So sad when anything by The Asylum is considered the smarter of anything.
As opposed to your no evidence? I’ll take it.
This cannot go unrecognized.
Because battleships r cool. Why does any military buy anything but battleships, Navy SEALS, SR-71s, and A-10s anyway? Other weapons are so boring!! OMG!
Feel free to ask me what I’ve written that needs cites.
I’d like to hear some of the pro battleship voices say what exactly it is they think a modern big gun ship would actually ever do outside of looking frickin’ sweet? As it was 70 years ago your navy had to find a use for them because a good general goes to war with what he or she has, not what they want. The battleships were costing money to keep around either way. So they got to pound on Normandy and some imperials in the pacific to justify having crews already trained to fight in that old style of warfare. Nobody builds coastal fortifications today and if they do they too are wasting their money.
And you know who made those reports? Men who had been through a sustained artillery barrage and were still alive. Generally speaking, a weapon that kills bodies is considered more effective than one that rattles souls.
You say this like it isn’t justification enough?
I was/am aware that the carriers were already somewhat prized. But the modern carrier and the 1930’s first cuts are not even related.
The point I was going for: the Japanese went to great lengths to find and destroy the BB’s.
Would they have, instead, used that capital to destroy the carriers? If they had spent as much time/money/whatever going after the carriers, could they have done it? Would the strategic balance have been tipped if they had?
It is my understanding that, in 1941, almost nobody valued a carrier above a battleship.
(a lesson that R. Reagan may not have ever learned)
Yes. The entire point of the Midway operation was to catch the carriers they missed at Pearl Harbor.
I get the impression you are under the mistaken assumption that the Japanese sank battleships and not carriers at Pearl Harbor because they chose to attack battleships and not carriers. That is wrong. They sank battleships because the battleships were there. Pearl Harbor is easy to find, it doesn’t move. If the carriers had been there they’d have sunk those.
The Japanese attack was not against battleships. It was against Pearl Harbor. They knew that SOME portion of the Pacific Fleet would be there and they were going to sink whatever they could. The Japanese knew it was likely the carriers might be out of port that day but that was the day the attack had to happen; it was unfortunate for them, but Pearl Harbor was only part of a very large, coordinated plan.
And they did try to do this - Midway. The entire point of Midway was to lure the American carrier force into a place where they knew it would be, so they could destroy it. Due in large part to bad luck they lost theirs instead, but make no mistake, they were there to sink the carriers.
You should ask for specific cites too but not like you have debunked anything I said.
Also, in post #60 I said the battleship has no role today. Yeah they are cool, no we should not build new ones or re-float old ones (how many even still exist…one as a museum?).
The only role I can see for a BB is when rail guns and lasers are standard items. When this happens anything that is line of sight is essentially dead.
Detectable missiles are knocked out by lasers or smaller faster rail guns, but lasers are unlikely to be able to stop rail gun shot or dumb shells.
You can initially launch missiles at the enemy until they gain the same capability to knock them down using their own lasers and guns, but then what? You will have to get close enough engage directly. Not much good if the first time you do so your fragile ship gets destroyed with a couple of rail gun shots. At that point you try to build a ship that can withstand the type of weapons the enemy is likely to deploy against you (or that you carry yourself) and you’re back to armored ships capable if dishing it out and taking it in return.
OK - Thanks!
I thought Midway was the other way around - the US taking advantage of a Japanese mistake in stumbling onto a US operation.
I did not understand that they were NOT there due to miscalculation, but were the ones actually on the hunt.
In other words, the cheap 16" shells that were being discussed are not guided, and a guided version doesn’t exist. They would need to be designed and a production line made, and since there would only be one tiny market for them (the battleships) the costs of that design and production line would need to be factored in to the per-shell cost. So I was correct in my assertion.
First off, the claim may not even be true - since there isn’t a current line of 16" shells to buy, and there would be a small market for them, you’d have to factor the startup costs and R&D costs for creating production lines and modernizing shells into the per-shell costs, and it would be a small number of shells since no one else is going to mount 16" guns on a ship.
More importantly, it’s a stupid statistic. No one cares about the per-shot cost of ammunition, they care how much it will cost to complete a mission. If it costs less per shell to have a battleship bombard an area, but more to operate the task force during that time, you’re not saving any money by building a new expensive ship that can deliver cheap shells.
Imagine that I have a business that does $1million a year in sales, and I’m trying to decide between two credit card processors. One costs $5000 to set up and $5000/year in straight fees, plus takes 2% of every transaction, while the other one costs $500,000 to set up and $500,000 per year in fees, but only takes 1% off of every transaction. By the ‘per shell cost’ argument, I should go with the second processor, because the per-transaction cost is half of the first one, so I’m clearly ahead. But if you look at the actual costs of using the system instead of a narrow metric, it’s clear that the second system is insanely expensive and would bankrupt my business in short order.
Basically the Japanese wanted to attack an objective and force out the US Carrier where they could be destroyed. The Americans found out what said objective was going to be and laid a trap.
Let’s simplify that example a little bit: if someone argues that the cost of fueling a Tesla is about half of what it costs to fuel a Prius, they are correct. But a Tesla costs three times more to buy than a Prius, so it’s a bullshit argument if the implication is that a Tesla is cheaper.
NM…I see it was resolved in a follow on post.
Even then, the Americans were lucky. The Japanese were alerted to the presence of the American carrier force, but could not pinpoint where it was. The American fleet sort of knew where the Japanese carriers were, in part because they knew what the Japanese plan generally was, but weren’t totally sure. But then three dive bomber groups chances upon the Japanese carrier force at the same time, at precisely the moment the fighter cover wasn’t there, and a few minutes later that was that.
I would hasten to add that the Japanese made a huge list of errors in their preparation for the battle and actions during the battle, but the extreme lethality of dive bombers against carriers and role of chance is well illustrated by the fact that even after the catastrophic loss of three of four carriers, what was left of the Japanese force - Hiryu - sent what she had left after the retreating bombers, found USS Yorktown, and smashed her to uselessness.
Definitely the 16" shells aren’t guided. And, as I’ve said, I don’t think that any proposed, new BB would use 16" shells in any case. What the Navy seems to be looking into is rail guns. Essentially, you will need a big ship to deploy the things since they use so much energy to fire. If you wanted a ship with a battery of such guns you’d really need something as big as a battleship to fire them from.
There are a couple of angles to this. First off, the ranges of a rail gun, especially one with guided munitions, could be over 100 nautical miles. We aren’t talking the old 20 NM here anymore. And they would be guided shells (assuming they work out the issue with the acceleration). That SOUNDS like it would be a great niche role for a new generation of BB. But…currently, when you power a rail gun up to those sorts of energy levels to get that sort of range and kinetic energy you are wearing away the rails pretty quickly…every shot basically turns part of the rail gun into plasma. That’s a Bad Thing™. You can, of course, cut down on the power and thus on the wear on the rails…drop it to, say, 50 nautical mile range instead and get double the shots. It’s still a pretty big limitation. Then you have the costs…IIRC, projectiles are only like $25k per round (pretty cheap compared to a missile), but the guns cost over $100 million from what I recall…very expensive. And they wear out quickly, as noted. You aren’t going to use a system like this for shore bombardment…but it could be useful for a lot of other things.
This gets back to what a new generation battleship would actually do, and what it’s potential role would be in a task force or battle group. It’s cool to be able to fire shells at over 5000 mph and hit targets at 100 NM, and it could be useful to be able to do those things…but do we really need one really big ship carrying several of these guns or a few ships with one each? From the perspective of the mission it seems to me that a distributed model is better overall for the mission, which, basically is to protect and support the carrier.
ETA: And, just FTR, I would LOVE to have battleships in the fleet. I think they are really cool, imposing and impressive, and would LOVE to see a bunch of very modern battleships decked out with rail guns and bristling with anti-air and other defenses. But, practically, I don’t see the utility when we could spend that money on more ships and get more bang for our buck.
They don’t exist because there are no cannon to launch them yet. But there are a ton of 16’’ shells in rusting stockpiles, and those could very feasibly be fitted with El Cheapo GPS guidance kits (much like some arty shells have been kitted, or like dumb innacurate Mk. 82 & 84s suddenly became pinpoint JDAM bombs after the first Gulf War) at a cost that is far, far, FAR below that of a Tomahawk missile. Even if the production line has to be made from scratch.
(It’s still dumb to bring back BBs though)