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In this scenario today aliens drop off around Japan one thousand Yamato class Battleships...

...these are made with higher quality steel than the original IJN Yamato and have improved engines which are made to modern standards of performance but are otherwise identical. They are fully fueled. They have a full complement of weapons, ammunition, small arms, fuel and seaplanes. The JSDF get the keys to them.

What happens?

Zor

Guided missiles and airpower happen.

Lack of support infrastructure happens.

Issues concerning crew manning happen.

The Diet(not to mention China, both Koreas, the EU, the Russians, and the US) raising all holy hell about potential violations of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution happens. Big time.

The Maritime Self-Defense Force would be better served by telling the aliens "we don't want 'em, we don't need 'em, we can't afford to keep 'em up. How 'bout taking 998 of them back, leave us one as a museum ship, with WWII era tech, and convert one to a very large aircraft-carrying destroyer with a modern air wing, some guided missiles, quick-firing 5" guns, and Phalanx CIWS for offense/defense, as a just in case. Pretty please."

All of them will be converted into cruise liner/transport ships or be scrapped. The rest are sold to Countries requiring some decent warship on the cheap, e.g. Philippines.

Yamatos are not cheap to operate and maintain, by any stretch of the imagination, especially not as a monkey model for a developing country. Who would still have to find and train almost 2,800 officers and ratings to man the damn thing, as well as create a support infrastructure to upkeep and maintain the white elephant.

And, then, what would be the ship's mission? Without guided missiles, it's next to useless as an anti-shipping platform, being outranged by contemporary SSMs(especially the Chinese and Russian ones with the big warheads)and naval aviation(and, just how did Yamato and Musashi meet their ends, boys and girls?), and is of limited utility in the naval gunfire support role. It lacks the comm gear and other electronics to be an effective flagship, which is pretty much all it can be, a flagship which whatever developing nation, especially the Philippines, is stuck with it can't even afford to operate and support.

(I suppose it might have some success as a commerce raider, especially with no DDGs providing escort, though a CVBG or a surface-action group roaming around would make that a nonviable option in time. And, it's a fucking huge white elephant. A navy would be better off getting attack submarines for that purpose)

The hell is your obsession with modern Japan being armed?

Well if they aren't how are they supposed to fight the angels?

Purple wrote:Well if they aren't how are they supposed to fight the angels?

They could always use a Death Note

Buy put options on steel immediately; the current glut is going to get worse as soon as those hulls make it to a scrap yard. Not too short dated though, it's going to take a major effort to remove all the fuel/oil and dispose of all the live explosives. In fact Japan will have to move fairly quickly (probably call in the USN) to secure all the hulls and avoid piracy or a significant environmental disaster.

Of course as usual for these scenarios, the existence of aliens are much more interesting than a pile of junky obsolete ships. Certainly a lot of people will be asking what possible motive they would have for such a bizarre first contact. Do the specifics of Yamato's last mission have some cultural resonance for these aliens?

On that note anything we do with the ships is going to have to be done with that in mind. Like if Japan just scraps them all how will the aliens react? What if it enrages them?

Purple wrote:Well if they aren't how are they supposed to fight the angels?

Mecha and magic girls, same as in any other animé.

Maybe they can convert them into spaceships or they're all really Transformers.

Enigma wrote:Maybe they can convert them into spaceships

With wave-motion cannon and maps to Iskandar even.

That's why they should keep one as a museum ship, silly!

Much better scenario: 1000 Yamatos drop along the coast of Somalia.

K. A. Pital wrote:Much better scenario: 1000 Yamatos drop along the coast of Somalia.

Are there even enough Somalians to man all those ships?

Odds are that they might man *one* or two, blow up a few by accident, and try to turn the rest into scrap before the USN does it for them.

I almost wonder if the USN has enough missiles to do the job... but it might be easier to just zoom by and drop a bunch of dumb bombs. Without modern AAA they aren't going to be able to do much against F/A-18's.

Yeah. But that's a shit ton of steel and semi-modern large-caliber weapons, even if you sink, ground and destroy the ships.

In the grim darkness of this RAR there is only war.

Well, the many huge wrecks will certainly end the problem of industrial trawlers overfishing the area with their huge nets.

They will also attract reef fish.

Which can be perfectly well fished by fishermen in small boats and small nets.

Somalian economy restored.
Piracy problem solved.

Elheru Aran wrote:

K. A. Pital wrote:Much better scenario: 1000 Yamatos drop along the coast of Somalia.

Are there even enough Somalians to man all those ships?

Odds are that they might man *one* or two, blow up a few by accident, and try to turn the rest into scrap before the USN does it for them.

I almost wonder if the USN has enough missiles to do the job... but it might be easier to just zoom by and drop a bunch of dumb bombs. Without modern AAA they aren't going to be able to do much against F/A-18's.

If all else fails, the US government can always have the ammunition plant in MacAlester crank out 2,000 MOABs. Or, just lay on more daisy cutters(6-ton yield, similar to the WW2 Tallboy bomb(s) which sank the Tirpitz).

K. A. Pital wrote:In the grim darkness of this RAR there is only war.

Except, of course, your average Somali warlord doesn't happen to have a forge world, a hive world, or a regiment of cogboys handy.

Well, let's see. Steel scrap, sure. How they would get it shipped out I don't know, probably some arrangement like they had going on in India and south Asia with the whole beaching ships and tearing them apart by hand. It'd take one hell of a while though.

The guns on the other hand. While they do come fully equipped with ammunition... nobody really has any use for the really big ones. I don't know how well you could repurpose them for fixed artillery fortifications, but those are bloody well obsolete now. The 18-inchers were rated up to 42 km range. That's nothing compared to what a decent carrier-launched fighter-bomber can do. The other arms were 155mm's, 5-inchers and 25mm AA. The 5 inchers are probably the most practical to sell; IIRC, even the USN still has a few of those, though I think they're largely automated now. Dunno about the 25mm's, I think those have largely been updated now; 20 and 23mm are more common.

If the Somalis can figure out some way to turn the guns into ground artillery, good for them-- there's *some* application there. But frankly they aren't going to be that useful and the most they're going to get out of a thousand Yamatos is one hell of a pirate ship that's a floating bulls-eye and a hella lot of scrap.

Opinions are mixed about the 25mm AA guns' effectiveness in WW2, though they might have value as historical curiousities. Same with a complete hull; the Somalis could sell one of them(disarmed, of course) to the Japanese as a museum ship for a healthy sum, though there's still the problem of what to do with all that ammunition.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:Opinions are mixed about the 25mm AA guns' effectiveness in WW2, though they might have value as historical curiousities. Same with a complete hull; the Somalis could sell one of them(disarmed, of course) to the Japanese as a museum ship for a healthy sum, though there's still the problem of what to do with all that ammunition.

Hence why I think it's quite possible some of the Somalis would blow themselves up just fucking around with the ships. I doubt they would have any experience handling heavy ammunition like the 155's or God forbid the 18-inchers.

Elheru Aran wrote:Hence why I think it's quite possible some of the Somalis would blow themselves up just fucking around with the ships. I doubt they would have any experience handling heavy ammunition like the 155's or God forbid the 18-inchers.

Especially if some random warlord gets it in his head to use those things in combat. Even a technical with one of the 25mm AA guns would be bad enough, though still not as practical as one armed with more commonly available belt-fed autocannon(the Japanese 25mm was peculiar for being fed from a box magazine).

I'll admit, though, this RAR! has gotten me re-reading my Destroyermen novels.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:

Elheru Aran wrote:Hence why I think it's quite possible some of the Somalis would blow themselves up just fucking around with the ships. I doubt they would have any experience handling heavy ammunition like the 155's or God forbid the 18-inchers.

Especially if some random warlord gets it in his head to use those things in combat. Even a technical with one of the 25mm AA guns would be bad enough, though still not as practical as one armed with more commonly available belt-fed autocannon(the Japanese 25mm was peculiar for being fed from a box magazine).

I'll admit, though, this RAR! has gotten me re-reading my Destroyermen novels.

Good luck to them. IIRC there's a USN battle group more or less permanently in the Indian Ocean/Persian Gulf region. It's only a matter of days before we deliver some General Dynamics loving in their general direction.

I was thinking more in terms "Somalian warlords turn these weapons on neighboring African states". None of which really have a decent Navy to speak of.