Sure you could mount it on a BB. So? The point of the defenses is to defend the platform so that the offensive weapons on the platform can do their job.
What’s the job of the BB? To mount gigantic guns that no other ship can mount. Except giant guns are a nearly useless weapons system in 2017, because they don’t have the range of modern weapons.
So we load the BB with modern weapons? Except those modern weapons can be carried by other platforms, you don’t need the biggest ships to hold these weapons. So building a giant ship with a lot of weapons makes no sense.
Again, the point of the platform is to maneuver the offensive weapons to the fight, and protect those offensive weapons. A gold-plated battleship is no better than a cheap frigate in this case. So the battleship is an obsolete platform.
What’s the job of the BB? To mount gigantic guns that no other ship can mount. Except giant guns are a nearly useless weapons system in 2017, because they don’t have the range of modern weapons.
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Except they are orders of magnitude cheaper.
And a BB is a symbol. In todays world, symbols are important.
Uhm, no. Like, not even close. A 16" gun can shoot about 25 miles. With newer rocket assisted shells, maybe 50 or 60 is possible. Antiship cruise missiles are like hundreds of miles, with a few designs cracking more than 1,000 miles.
The Marine Corps has put a lot of work into what it needs to do amphibious landings. For many years, the idea was that an amphibious ship would need to be roughly a few miles from the shore in order to have Marines get into an AAV, have the vehicle swim to shore, and not have Marines so seasick they couldn’t fight.
But as the Marine Corps dug into the issue, they were finding that having a big amphib ship sitting a few miles offshore just can’t be defended. It is a sitting duck for missiles. So the idea of a battleship sitting, say, 20 miles offshore, pounding away like you’re watching Victory at Sea, is not realistic to me in the slightest. Because literally every single missile that can reach the amphib 5 miles offshore, can also reach the battleship 20 miles offshore.
Aside from that, the Marine Corps hasn’t really cracked the nut on how to do contested amphibious landings in the modern era. IMHO, the choices are down to: 1. land in uncontested or lightly contested areas, or 2. acknowledge the end of the era of kicking down the door on the beach.
I cannot speak for the other person but I think they are saying the 1915 design lagged far behind a WWII battleship design. The Iowa class ships were far more robust than a 1915 era battleship and were pretty much the pinnacle of heavily armored ship design before or since.
For instance Bismarck (an equivalent to an Iowa class) took 300-400 hits (of all sorts) before sinking. They were ridiculously tough ships.
Armor piercing warhead… meant to take out battleships of the day.
Modern missiles don’t have that hardened steel nose. They just rely on the mass of the missile to punch through the unarmored hulls and decks of modern warships before the warhead is detonated. Which isn’t going to be terribly effective vs inches of hardened armor meant to resist equally heavy armor piercing shells going about as fast.
I was saying a battleship can shoot continuously a LOT longer than a missile ship can fling missiles continuously. That lasting power is important to forces who are relying on your cover.
Artillery is important to marine landings and sometimes that artillery support can only come from the sea.
True but to be fair if we had battleships our enemies would build missiles capable of damaging them. That said such missiles would not be able to be deployed on just anything.
Also, the shells may cheaper than the missiles but each battleship could only carry roughly 1900 shells. .
Not only that, the gun lining would be worn out after roughly 350 rounds.
Assuming, they could keep up the 2 rounds per minute firing (actual rate in practice was slower).
It would be 18 rounds per minute and the 1900 shells would run out in just over 100 minutes assuming the maximum firing rate.
Realistically, the actual firing rate would be slower but even still, the shells would run out in a few hours.
Load up the ship a second time with another 1900 shells and fire them all and the gun lining would need to be refurbished again.
(3800 shells/9 guns) ~ 422 rounds per gun (Which is beyond the expected maximum but I am giving a little allowance here for design margins)
Take these 3800 shells from emptying the complement twice and multiply that by all 4 Iowa ships and you get 15200 shells which almost the exact number that were in storage (assuming that they are still available)
How is ‘number of hours firing’ a useful metric? The battle ship is firing less effective munitions slower and from a more vulnerable position, the fact that it can do so for longer (presuming no one kills it) isn’t really a virtue.
Those are unguided shells without any guidance or submunitions, not ammunition with precision and effectiveness on par with modern weapons. If the US wants to drop lots of dumb munitions on a target, it can be done by other means without the massive expenditure and vulnerability of a battleship, though carpet bombing has largely fallen out of favor.
The obsolete Arizona was 26 years old when it was sunk at harbor in 1941. If we’re digging the Iowa and New Jersey out of mothballs, they were launched in…when was it? 1942. My math is a little rusty, but my calculations indicate that would make the New Jersey 75 years old in 2017.
There have been some advances in technology since 1942. And in fact, these battleships were obsolete before they were even launched, let alone in 2017.
Exactly right. We don’t have to fire super-expensive smart bombs at the enemy. We can go back to Operation Linebacker-style carpet bombing, and just dump tons and tons of dumb bombs out of a B-52. Cheap!
And extremely ineffective. How many sorties and how many tons of dumb bombs do those B-52s have to drop before they hit the target? A $1,000,000 smart bomb that hits the target is cheaper than a thousand $1000 dumb bombs that don’t.
A guy with a bag full of rocks can throw them for hours. A guy with a rifle and a five round clip will run through his ammo supply in a couple of seconds. Who do you think would win in a fight?
You mean they can’t fly a shell through a specific window? No but they can get close enough.
I think you vastly underestimate the accuracy of naval artillery fire. In the old days it was not so good but with modern computers they are excellent.
As for other types of effectiveness someone above mentioned B52 carpet bombing as ineffective. I cannot find the story but I recall reading an account from the early days in Afghanistan where the enemy was dug in and despite many, many “effective” missiles being shot at them and “smart” bombs being dropped on them they would not be dislodged. So they flew a few B52s over the place, carpet bombed the area and voila…cleared em right out.
Read reports of men in WWI and WWII caught in a sustained artillery barrage. It rattles the soul in ways missiles never can.
I believe the battleship main guns were nicknamed swimming pool makers because they would carve out a hole about the size of a swimming pool. These are a LOT bigger “booms” than any non-nuke missile musters.
The weight of fire a battleship can maintain with consistency far surpasses any missile system for a LOT less cost.
