What if there were a new type of ship that had 2 12-inch LRLAP equivalents, was as big and heavily armored as a battleship, and also had quite a bit of missile launch capacity as well. Would you call it an armored cruiser, a battleship, or a different type of ship altogether? (I personally would not quibble if someone called it any of the three.)
Like I said earlier, the Navy has been looking into several guided long(er) range projectile projects. I believe the LRLAP project was shelved in the cuts to the Zumwalt, but IIRC the shells were as expensive as a missile, so not like you could save a lot there. I don’t recall the range, but I think it was on par with the Navy’s rail gun system…i.e. IIRC it was like 100 nautical miles.
It was a hypothetical, assuming that guided shells become significantly cheaper than missiles. However, the Wiki page says that they were as expensive as a missile given the cuts to the program, so I would think that if they were produced in as large quantities as missiles they would be cheaper. Now whether they’d be significantly cheaper is another story.
The Wiki also implies that you have the option of unguided shells which would be a bonus and at any rate would be desirable in my hypothetical 12-incher gun.
This all is not to imply that we should pursue heavily armored, large guided shell ships. I do think that flexible guided, boosted shells should still be pursued, however.
There’s still the range issue, which is pretty significant. Shells require a huge cannon barrel to have any kind of range and it still top out far below what a mediocre missile can travel. A weapon that can hit a target two hundred miles away has a big advantage over a weapon that can hit a target twenty miles away.
Oh, I agree. The Navy is of course pursuing various long range guided munitions programs. I think they are currently focused more on their rail gun project…perhaps overly so, since it’s pretty cool. It does have some significant issues though. But having such a capability is certainly an advantage, even at the ranges we are talking about (i.e. 50-100 nm). You could justify a new class of BB based on some of the new weapons as well as missiles and defenses, but such a ship would be very expensive, making it more difficult to risk and even justify. Heck, even the new destroyers are costing a lot more than they thought they would…scaling up to the size of a battleship would just be cost prohibitive when you look cost verse benefit.
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There’s still the range issue, which is pretty significant. Shells require a huge cannon barrel to have any kind of range and it still top out far below what a mediocre missile can travel. A weapon that can hit a target two hundred miles away has a big advantage over a weapon that can hit a target twenty miles away.
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Well, we aren’t talking about 20 mile range though…more like 50-100 nautical miles or even beyond that. And the new cannons they are talking about aren’t all that massive either. Also, the mission would be different than that of a missile. I think having SOME sort of cannon armed combatant can be justified. I don’t think it needs to be a single very large ship, though if you are going with rail guns you need a pretty big ship to put the current generation on as they are huge power hogs. I don’t THINK there is a real requirement for a battleship type platform with batteries of the things though, but it’s not as crazy a concept when you stop thinking they are bringing back the Iowa and actually look at what they are developing and what you can mount on a large vessel.
I think there are two cross-currents here - one is the 1943 version of a BB; the other the perceived need for something the approx size of a 1943 BB to serve as a weapons platform for still-evolving technology.
By the time the new weapons are operational, I am going to guess the people responsible for them will want something faster, stealthier, and much less labor-intensive than the 1943 version
Ignorance fought thank you Telemark and XT! I wonder if the lack of battleship action since the Pacific contributed to the operator error there.
The topic of shipkillers like that russian monster brings up a question of strategy. Is it more valuable to sink an enemy vessel like a battleship outright or just pound it into a salvage job? I tend to think the latter is better at stopping an enemy from completing objectives particularly in cold waters where swimmers dont last. A smoking wreck riddled with medical and other emergencies will tie up more vessels coming to its aid than one which has dissapeared with all hands, I tend to think. I can’t speak for history though and I can see the greater morale boost of sinking the enemy. How did previous naval thinking prioritize kill vs wound?
I love the talk of railguns because research in that area will create much more valuable things than mere weapons. Forget the oceans, lets kill the cost of space launches 
The hollywood part of my brain can totally imagine railgun ships though.
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I see the dual conversations here.
The reason for that is the 1943-1944 versions of the IOWA class are (almost) the last battleships built and were the last ones still operating. (And I may note are still in impressive shape, if you ever visit one of them as a museum ship - highly recommended)
This is what everyone goes by when referring to a battleship as it is a real life ship.
Yes, something newer would have the goal of being newer, faster, longer ranged, and obviously stealthier and if it could be less labor intensive - all the better.
Something else that I still find mind-boggling is the ranges listed for the guns alone, not even considering the missiles.
A lot of people have difficulty conceiving just how far 15 miles really is on terms of shooting. (Remember that 25 miles is closer to the maximum range of the IOWA.
At 15 miles, a large ship the size of the IOWA looks like a tiny spec and is barely over the horizon. To think that these guns could reasonable accurately target these ships from that far away is incredible.
In WW2, there were a few gun battles in the 15 mile range (Probably the most famous was the Hood and POW versus Bismarck). Even at those ranges, the Germans got 7 hits on the POW and probably 3 - 4 hits on the Hood - blowing it up. In turn the Brits got, I think about 4 hits on the Bismarck.
There was a couple hundred shells fired so the hit percentage was around 3% at that distance. This was without using Radar as well
With Radar and other ways to guide these shots, I have no doubt that the accuracy could be improved up to say 10% at 15 miles. That to me is mind-boggling that a gun could be that accurate over such a long distance.
Then to add guided missiles to the mix and their potential accuracy at long ranges, that simply is just mind-boggling to me.
It’s amusing to me how the size of a “destroyer” has creeped up in the last 60 years.
Arleigh-Burkes weigh in at almost 10,000 tons, which (entirely by coincidence) was the size limit set in the Washington Naval Treaty. Any combatant larger than 10,000 tons counted against your battleship tonnage, no matter what size main guns it has. Destroyers built in WW2 (the Fletcher class) were 2,000 tons.
This size creep is because the Navy wants their warships to be as flexible as possible (multi-mission capable), so it has to carry a variety of gear.
I sometimes wonder why they retain the old “destroyer” type name. Is it easier to get funding in Congress?
The battleships saw plenty of action. They would shell invasion beaches for days at a time, leaving those ships well within reach of the enemy for extended periods. They fired off hundreds of rounds, proving that the battleship breech loaded gun remained a well proven technology.
Typically, IMO, a ship that is disabled too near the reach of the enemy is going to be scuttled. (See the last hours of the USS Hornet, here. )
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With Radar and other ways to guide these shots, I have no doubt that the accuracy could be improved up to say 10% at 15 miles. That to me is mind-boggling that a gun could be that accurate over such a long distance.
Then to add guided missiles to the mix and their potential accuracy at long ranges, that simply is just mind-boggling to me.
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Again, the guns the Navy is actually looking into have ranges up to 10 times more than your 15-mile mark (between 50 and 100 NAUTICAL miles…or more)…and can hit pretty small targets or moving targets in some cases at that range with guided munitions. I’d guess the accuracy would be comparable to the Army’s Excalibur system which is going to be way more than a mere 10% increase. The missile systems, of course, have even greater ranges and capabilities, though there are some downsides to using something like a Tomahawk where a gun might have a niche role.
I think people are having a hard time grasping the changes the Navy is working on…everyone seems to be stuck thinking of those big 16" guns that could fire and hit targets 20 miles away.
So it can hit an enemy ship between 50 and 100 nautical miles away?
So if that ship is 200 or 400 nautical miles away, and is a carrier sending planes over to bomb the battleship that’s heading for 100-mile range – what happens? Or if that ship is launching missiles from 200 or 400 nautical miles away – what happens?
If you are the only ship in the task group and if all you have is a battery of long-range guided naval guns, I guess you are fucked. 
But, see, the thing is that various ships do various things in a task or battle group. So, if you had a modern battleship with the sort of gun capability we are talking about then…well, you’d probably send your own fighters out from your carrier, perhaps use missiles from various other ships (or the battleship which would have more than just a battery of rail guns or whatever). The battleships role wouldn’t be to be Rambo and fight everything itself with muscles bulging and red bandana flaring…that’s not how modern naval combat, especially US style, works.
No, I get that. I get that, if it were on its own, it’d be “fucked” during combat at that range; and that, if it were in a modern-naval-combat US-style group during combat at that range, it wouldn’t use its comparatively short-range guns while the big carrier sent out long-range planes and the little ships sent out long-range missiles.
So if naval combat is going to take place at that range, why would I add a battleship with 100-mile guns to that group? Wouldn’t I prefer to add another missile ship that can blast targets at that range, instead of a battleship that’s not actually doing anything right now but is totally ready for action if enemies get within 100 miles?
(You add that the battleship could, in long-range combat, double as one more of those missile ships – but one that’d cost more and be harder to replace, right? Wouldn’t my money be better spent on more missile ships in the first place?)
Well, that’s the crux of the argument really. To me, I don’t see an overwhelming need to spend so much on a single ship that justifies the cost verse having several ships that distribute the role. I DO think there is a justification for a long range and guided naval gun…there will be times when having that capability will allow you more flexibility than using a missile. I just don’t see the need to have a very large ship with a battery of the things as opposed to having a few ships with one each. What I was trying to say was that people are looking at a new generation of battleships almost entirely in terms of something like the Iowa…and that’s kind of a strawman.
A modern battleship would probably have guns, but they wouldn’t be the old style 16" guns. It will almost certainly have missiles on it as well…after all, even the Iowa class ships when they were brought back into service had Tomahawks on them. It will have anti-air as well as ASW and other modern defenses too. It would be, basically, a really big Zumwalt or other modern class with a smaller crew than an Iowa, more automation than an Iowa, and vastly more capable than an Iowa (i.e. all of the new weapons would be integrated and not bolted on, would use very modern search systems, very modern fire control and be fully integrated with the battle groups data network, etc etc). If you want to debate this, IMHO, you need to speak to what it would be, not talk about why an Iowa is silly in the modern fleet. Everyone knows it’s silly…that’s why those ships are museum pieces now.
Basically, it comes down to cost. Based on the Zumwalt, a battleship would probably cost as much as a modern supercarrier (aside from the air-wing). But it wouldn’t give you, IMHO, a supercarriers list of capabilities for the cost. So why would you build one when you could build, say, 2.5 Zumwalts for the same cost as that one battleship? To me, THAT is the real reason why the Navy isn’t going to bring back the battleships…from a capabilities perspective they just aren’t worth the cost of a supercarrier.
And what would be the point of cramming all that into ONE hull? Then you just have a single high value target without any additional combat power than those 2.5 Zumwalts that the Navy could get for the same price.
Battleships were very much a product of naval gun warfare. They directly evolved out of the old age of sail first, second and third rates, and were the pinnacle of that sort of warfare. They needed to be big in order to win- a ship capable of carrying an appropriate number of 14-16" guns and the necessary armor, associated crew, ammunition and what-not, had to be very large ships.
It’s not that way now- a ship capable of carrying a reasonable number of missiles, along with the crew, fire control, etc… doesn’t have to be large, and they’re not.
An important consideration on cost, regardless of size of the platform, is up front build cost versus operational/life cycle costs. That the gun likely has much lower per shot costs than Tomahawks. The Tomahawk is around 1 million a pop and reliant on good predictions of how much needs to be spent annually to buy war stocks. They have a shelf life. Even guided rounds for guns tend to be much cheaper since they don’t need a single use propulsion system. There are also roles for the even cheaper unguided rounds inside their range.
Since the development I’ve seen along those lines has been for smaller platforms anyway, that’s still not an argument for a BB.
Once upon a time, Air Force Doctrine Document 1-1 stated in its introduction “The Armed Forces of the United States are organized for combat effectiveness, not cost efficiency.”
(From memory, from 20 years ago, so don’t blame me if I worded it slightly wrong.)
Penny-pinching is the second thing the US military has traditionally stopped doing once a shooting war starts. (The first is promoting flag officers for political reasons rather than leadership and combat merit.) “It’s cheaper” (even fully considering system lifecycle costs) is a terrible argument compared to combat effectiveness. And don’t forget, dumb guns have a shelf life too, and not observing that has catastrophic outcomes.
Well, unless the ship it’s on gets sunk after it fires one shot – or before it gets close enough to fire one shot, if it’s sunk from missile range before it arrives in gun range. Or whatever.
Obviously this isn’t an official data point but back in the eighties, Victory Games released a series of games based on modern naval warfare. These were games but they were attempting to portray naval combat realistically. The various weapon systems like missiles, aircraft, torpedoes, and guns along with the defensive systems were simulated based on their real world capabilities.
As I noted, they simulated the guns of the big surface ships. But they stopped doing that after the first game in the series. The designers acknowledged they did this because people playing the game never came across a situation where the gun factors were used.