Are battleships really obsolete

[Darth Wong]

Yes, battleships will always have ultimate coolness. Mind you, sword-fighting is much cooler than rifles too.

[Doomriser]

One problem with BBs is that their heavy metal is - get this - LOST TECH!!! As I understand, if we had to build new 16in guns and armour like the Iowas have, it would take decades to retool industry and subsequently produce the stuff. This is a major logistical disadvantage and means that we cannot afford to take hits or losses in the BB fleet. OTOH the U.S. is well-equipped to build and repair carriers.

[His Divine Shadow]

Yes, battleships will always have ultimate coolness. Mind you, sword-fighting is much cooler than rifles too.

Yes, lightsabers.

[phongn]

One problem with BBs is that their heavy metal is - get this - LOST TECH!!! As I understand, if we had to build new 16in guns and armour like the Iowas have, it would take decades to retool industry and subsequently produce the stuff. This is a major logistical disadvantage and means that we cannot afford to take hits or losses in the BB fleet. OTOH the U.S. is well-equipped to build and repair carriers.

Indeed. The places that forged the guns and armor are long gone. It would take enormous investment to rebuild them, and it just isn't worth it for a few ships.

[phongn]

They are cool though

Especially the US Standards with their lovely cage masts!

(j/k!)

[LordChaos]

The 16/50 riffles aren't any more of a problem now then they were originaly (they historicaly took the longest time to produce anyways).

It's the armor plating that is, in it's current form, beyond our capabilities. We simply can not produce armor plates of that size and thickness anymore. However, there are a few materials we can produce and layer to provide similar (to most objects) protection.

[RayCav of ASVS]

Yes, battleships will always have ultimate coolness. Mind you, sword-fighting is much cooler than rifles too.

heh, can someone say lightsabres?:)

just adding that for a bit of OT-randomness:)

[RayCav of ASVS]

I just wish they never reactivated the Missouri, and just took her in straight as a museum ship. They ruined her and her WWII historical/uniqueness by modernising her. Imagine how neat it would be to walk not only on the Missouri today, but the Missouri as it nearly looked during the surrender!

And another thing, if you really want a ship to pound the hell out of a coast, use my suggestion. We already have half a dozen OHPs in mothballs, and even a few slated for scrapping. We could modify them at a fraction of the cost that it would take to reactivate the Iowas. Or we can even build new hulls and revisit the old Monitor idea of the World Wars. We can build a new, cheap hull, using automation to keep crews down. We can have a bunch of 6-inch, 5-inch, or even 4-inch guns, or we can even have just one gun. This is how I see it though:

A small ship, maybe about 1,000 tons or less, maybe around 1,500 tons, with no armor. A very small ship nonetheless. Highly automated, with a small crew. Its main armament would be one or two 155 mm feild pieces in a single turret, modified for increased range and penetration. Most of the ship's internal volume would be dedicate to ammuntion for these guns. The only other armament would be a quad Stinger launcher on the tail, or maybe even a Rolling-Airframe missile, maybe Phalanx too. No helicopter facilities. Also, no stealth either, since this is designed to be as cheap a platform as possible, and will never operate alone anyway - one or two at least will always accompany an amphibious assault group with its LHA and escorts.

Hell, you can even have standard army feild pieces on a pressed merchant ship for all I care!

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

Wasn't the Monitor from the Civil War?

Anyway, what would be cool is a battleship/submarine. After I hit my head on a towel rack, I thought it could have the weapons of both sea vehicles, and could go hundreds of meters deeper than current nuclear submarines. Woud that ever work?

[Azeron]

Last i checked tank amrour (some sort of carbon mesh) was about 3-5 stronger than than steel. So you are saying a 2000lb bomb could penetrate the equivilent of 16 feet of solid steal? hmm thats hard to beleive, I would think that would take a major LOSAT weapon or a much heavier weapon to do that. I aggree, weapons that hit the deck would go through if the deck wasn't as heavily armoured as the sides. I was thinking of more like monitor deisgn. Why can;t a ship have heavy armour and excellent point defenses? And yes an IOWA class ship can stand up to sunburn and exocet missles.

How are you going to shield planes from EMP pules if your fighters are using radar which the pulse can use to ride into the rest of the plane? You could shield the cockpit, but that will darken the tint of the canopy and make it harder to see.

Helicopters? Are you serious, how are they going to stand up to hand held surface to air missles when you send them in waves? maybe if we only fight somalians or iraqis, but what about the chinese? those russian shoulder missles are leathal and really cheap.

perhaps you misunderstand me when I talking about this versus relative firepower of carriers. I am just saying this is nice in addition to the force, not a replacement. Being able to fire 16 '' shells will make sure an area is clear of enemies, because nothing can stadn up to it. You fly 10k feet up and look for something. like in kosovo it will probably be wooden replicass, and you will have wasted a million dollar missle on a hundred dollar replica. Why not spend the money on something more valuealbe and leave the cheap stuff to artilery to area bombard?

A hundred miles is a large operational area to work with extremely heavy artilery support.

IOWA is a triple hulled wonder. I think you should go talk to a grunt, what they think about airplanes vs heavy artilery. a shell from a 16 incher puts the feer of god into the enemy. The Extended range artilery system can't even kill a tank from what I hear. Probably better ofgf sticking to a MRLS system instead.

Granted you could buy a fleet of f/a-18's with the operational cost of a battleship, but try and field them, train the pit crews, support facitilites, radar, force protection. forget it if you weant to put it on a carrier. then the number goes down to what 2 or 3?

I don;t think it would take a decade to produce 16'' tubes, we do have speicality large scale custom fabrication factories in the US.

Perhaps i have similar feelings about the crusader. They cancelled it becasue it wasn't fast enough to get places. But you know what in many circumstances it is a really good piece of hardware to have. Instead of draeaming of what could be with tomorrows weapons, Ithink they passsed up on piece of hardware that would have done allot good in perviously unthought of positions.

As for drones, they require obscene amounts of bandwidth to use. only 3 could operate at any given time in afganistan becasue of bandwidth limitations. it will take 10's of billions of dollars worth of satalites to fix this defieceny. I wonder why we are taking to it so quickly. I don't see why we can't do both in the interim while the technology matures and proves itself (which it will do evenetually)

[Doomriser]

Wasn't the Monitor from the Civil War?

Anyway, what would be cool is a battleship/submarine. After I hit my head on a towel rack, I thought it could have the weapons of both sea vehicles, and could go hundreds of meters deeper than current nuclear submarines. Woud that ever work?

Read about:

The British Submarine M1
and/or
the Japanese submarine/cruisers

[Doomriser]

Last i checked tank amrour (some sort of carbon mesh) was about 3-5 stronger than than steel. So you are saying a 2000lb bomb could penetrate the equivilent of 16 feet of solid steal? hmm thats hard to beleive, I would think that would take a major LOSAT weapon or a much heavier weapon to do that. I aggree, weapons that hit the deck would go through if the deck wasn't as heavily armoured as the sides. I was thinking of more like monitor deisgn. Why can;t a ship have heavy armour and excellent point defenses? And yes an IOWA class ship can stand up to sunburn and exocet missles.

Even if your insane unbuildable battleship design could be built, can you imagine how much it would cost?

"like in kosovo it will probably be wooden replicass, and you will have wasted a million dollar missle on a hundred dollar replica. Why not spend the money on something more valuealbe and leave the cheap stuff to artilery to area bombard?"

And battleships won't be fooled by wooden replicas, even though they use the exact same satellite and aerial recon for their targeting data? All that would be different is that cost and risk of bringing a battleship near shore for sustained firing vs. a much safer and quicker hit and run from carrier aircraft.

"The Extended range artilery system can't even kill a tank from what I hear. Probably better ofgf sticking to a MRLS system instead."

Bullshit. Top-down ICMs from a 155 can kill most tanks.

"Granted you could buy a fleet of f/a-18's with the operational cost of a battleship, but try and field them, train the pit crews, support facitilites, radar, force protection. forget it if you weant to put it on a carrier. then the number goes down to what 2 or 3?"

Naturally, a battleship would not incur radar, force protection, etc... costs?

"I don;t think it would take a decade to produce 16'' tubes, we do have speicality large scale custom fabrication factories in the US."

It's the armour that would be the real problem. And it doesn't matter anyway. When it comes to weapons vs. armour, weapons win.

Face it. Battleships are not versatile enough nor are they cost effective enough to be part of a modern navy. The next generation of monitors and destroyers will be able to fufill the shore bombardment role and they are stealth to boot.

[Doomriser]

From warships1.com

BBs don't worry about bad weather that grounds the CAW, or in the target area.
Assuming they don't need to adjust fire that is. If the weather is too bad to operate modern aircraft, it's too bad for observers to do their job too.

BBs can do "it" all day, and night, continousely.
Possibly partly true. They can only operate continuously as long as the crew lasts.

I believe what you really mean is that they can respond more quickly than air suport in most cases, if they're in range. OTOH, I have three times the number of US carriers alone not including NATO CV's, land, and LHA based air. I'm far more likely to get air support than BB support. I also have no hope of BB support if I'm more than thirty kilometers inland.

BBs don't worry about someone else's BBs (if there were any).

Nonsense. Bismarck, for instance was battered to a hulk by battleship fire (after being crippled by an 18 inch aircraft torpedo), as were several pre-war built capital ships (including Hood, Scharnhorst, Kirishima, and Yamashiro).
The other treaty and post treaty BB's that were sunk were sunk by aircraft.

CVNs do, thats why they have a fleet with them and 90 airplanes.
Actually, they're worried about aircraft, missiles, and submarines, as are battleships, and Most of the aircraft carried are offensive. Even the defensive ones are more usually used for attack or as attack escorts today.

BBs can out run their escorts, and sometimes do. CVNs won't do this (but they can).

I doubt they make a habit of it on operations any more than CVN's do.

The eight remaining BBs, collectively, cost less to build than a single CVN.

That's not actually true if you convert to current dollars. In that case they cost about six billion 2002 dollars collecctively to build. That is more than a CVN. Add four billion more if you want them to have modern systems. Add even more for the refits necessary to make them seaworthy again - two hundred million each or so for the Iowas, much more for the three other Treaty ships, and even more for the Texas.

The Midways, by comparison, cost about ten million 1945 dollars less to build than an Iowa at about a hundred million 1945 dollars. I would be very surprised if you could build a battleship today for much less than a CVN.

A BB will get "up close and personal" to your beach.

So long as someone has cleared the mines first. It also has insufficient range to support the air landed Marines further inland.

A BB delivers more ordance cheaper.
Cheaper perhaps, but not more and only up to thirty kilometers inland.

A BB can "take a licking and keep on ticking".

That's not entirely true, and not very relevant. BB's are also much more likely to be hit than CVN's as they must get well within enemy targeting range. No American or allied CV has been damaged from enemy action since 1945. The same cannot be said for surface ships, including battleships the last time they faced serious shore opposition in Korea.

Hit a CVN and she is in the shipyard for years.

Depends on the damage. BB's are probably about as vulnerable to torpedo damage and AP bombs as CVN's for instance.

[RedImperator]

The main problem with a sub/battleship hybrid is that you'd sacrifice the main advantage of both weapons. Mounting guns on a submarine would make it impossible to move silently, due to their shape (they'd churn up lots of water) and the fact they'd have to mount them outside the hull. It was okay in WWII because the detection systems of the day weren't good enough to take advantage of the extra noise the deck guns made, but not against modern sonar. A submarine armored as heavily as a battleship would have to be enormous, to generate enough bouyancy to submerge (and surface again--a lead paperweight has all the bouyancy you need to SINK ), which would make it fantastically expensive and, ironically, obscenely vulnerable. If you thinned the armor down, you could make the boat smaller but then you'd be sacrificing the most important aspect of battleship-ness. The sub would also have to be huge because battleship guns need a stable platform to fire accurately, which is impossible on a vessel below a certain size in anything worse than glass-calm waters. Finally, a battleship's main armament is more than just a surface feature. Each turret extends down many decks, nearly to the keel. On the U.S.S. New Jersey (now a museum docked 10 minutes from my house), the turrets are so heavy they're held in place by nothing but gravity, and I believe it's the same for all battleships (when the Bismarck sank, she capsized and then later righted herself on the way down. Dr. Robert Ballard, who found her, found nothing but empty holes where her turrets had been--I don't recall if they found the turrets themselves). In a submarine, these gigantic structures would play hell with your bouyancy and may have to be physically attached to the hull.

All that being said, a submerging battleship WOULD be cool, if only it were practical. Better though to build one battleship and one submarine and let each do one job well instead of two jobs poorly.

[Admiral Piett]

[quote="Azeron"]Last i checked tank amrour (some sort of carbon mesh) was about 3-5 stronger than than steel. So you are saying a 2000lb bomb could penetrate the equivilent of 16 feet of solid steal? hmm thats hard to beleive, I would think that would take a major LOSAT weapon or a much heavier weapon to do that. I aggree, weapons that hit the deck would go through if the deck wasn't as heavily armoured as the sides. I was thinking of more like monitor deisgn. Why can;t a ship have heavy armour and excellent point defenses? And yes an IOWA class ship can stand up to sunburn and exocet missles.

Yes,thanks to her size,damage control and redundancy.Armored belts and deck do not help that much.

How are you going to shield planes from EMP pules if your fighters are using radar which the pulse can use to ride into the rest of the plane? You could shield the cockpit, but that will darken the tint of the canopy and make it harder to see.

Are you planning to build your new battleship without radars?

perhaps you misunderstand me when I talking about this versus relative firepower of carriers. I am just saying this is nice in addition to the force, not a replacement. Being able to fire 16 '' shells will make sure an area is clear of enemies, because nothing can stadn up to it. You fly 10k feet up and look for something. like in kosovo it will probably be wooden replicass, and you will have wasted a million dollar missle on a hundred dollar replica. Why not spend the money on something more valuealbe and leave the cheap stuff to artilery to area bombard?

I suppose that this means that you planned to send the battleships in the Danube...

A hundred miles is a large operational area to work with extremely heavy artilery support.

IOWA is a triple hulled wonder. I think you should go talk to a grunt, what they think about airplanes vs heavy artilery. a shell from a 16 incher puts the feer of god into the enemy.

Unless one lands on his head.A 16 inches gun is not a weapon you can use when your troops and the enemy are close.A 127mm or a 155 mm,especially with guided shells, are much better for the job.Granted,when you have to bomb a target and no one of yours is around a 16 inches may be a better option.

The Extended range artilery system can't even kill a tank from what I hear. Probably better ofgf sticking to a MRLS system instead.

It is an option.

Granted you could buy a fleet of f/a-18's with the operational cost of a battleship, but try and field them, train the pit crews, support facitilites, radar, force protection. forget it if you weant to put it on a carrier. then the number goes down to what 2 or 3?

I don;t think it would take a decade to produce 16'' tubes, we do have speicality large scale custom fabrication factories in the US.

If you want it with an autoloader probably it will takes "a little" more.

Perhaps i have similar feelings about the crusader. They cancelled it becasue it wasn't fast enough to get places. But you know what in many circumstances it is a really good piece of hardware to have. Instead of draeaming of what could be with tomorrows weapons, Ithink they passsed up on piece of hardware that would have done allot good in perviously unthought of positions.

Many projects (ERGMs and a few others) are not exactly so remote.Mainly they lack funds.A Iowa class battleship will require 200 millions of dollar and a long period of time for the refit and crew training to be put in service without ANY upgrades,which means electronics 10 years old,useless ABLs and so on.With the same time and money you could develop and deploy some of the fire support systems I have already described.

[Stuart Mackey]

You know I have been reading some vary convincing articles about how the Battleship as a weapons type platform was unfairly dissmissed. right now the US navy has no direct gun support evxcept for some puny sub 200 mm guns.

General snipping
I wont go over the protection/hitting power issue that others have covered. I will say that the biggest argument against the Iowa class reactivation is cost vs utility. These are WW2 ships and have only about 15 years or less effective service life, this simply is not enough reason to spend the money when the rest of the USN can do the job with some more ships of current design that will last longer.

[LordShaithis]

Distance is far superior to armor when it comes to keeping a ship in one piece, and carriers can keep their distance. Even if your shiny new battleship had armor impervious to every modern weapon short of a nuke, someone would make it their first priority to build a missile to sink it.

[Admiral Piett]

Seriously for me this debate is a deja vu,after having read months of debates at the "battleships,should them be back in service" board of warship1.com
Personally I suspect that the motivations of at least a large portion of the battleship fans are more a matter for dr Freud analysis rather for rational debates.They want the battleships back because they are cool.Which is usually their final argument:"Battleships are needed because they have a great psychological impact on/scare the hell out of the enemy" Of course the psychological impact of a battleship crippled by a mine or a torpedo and forced to retreat is never taken in consideration.
Lack of resources is never a problem.To find hundreds of millions of dollars for the refits,without mentioning that they will take a lot of time, and, more important,thousands of sailors is never a problem.Unless of course they are speking about the alternative fire support programs which "are dreams,for the lack of money/time".Which of course will be abundantly available for their battleships.

[Stuart Mackey]

Distance is far superior to armor when it comes to keeping a ship in one piece, and carriers can keep their distance. Even if your shiny new battleship had armor impervious to every modern weapon short of a nuke, someone would make it their first priority to build a missile to sink it.

The history of naval warfare ina nutshell.

[Stuart Mackey]

Seriously for me this debate is a deja vu,after having read months of debates at the "battleships,should them be back in service" board of warship1.com
Personally I suspect that the motivations of at least a large portion of the battleship fans are more a matter for dr Freud analysis rather for rational debates.They want the battleships back because they are cool.Which is usually their final argument:"Battleships are needed because they have a great psychological impact on/scare the hell out of the enemy" Of course the psychological impact of a battleship crippled by a mine or a torpedo and forced to retreat is never taken in consideration.
Lack of resources is never a problem.To find hundreds of millions of dollars for the refits,without mentioning that they will take a lot of time, and, more important,thousands of sailors is never a problem.Unless of course they are speking about the alternative fire support programs which "are dreams,for the lack of money/time".Which of course will be abundantly available for their battleships.

Lol, aint it the truth!. One thing most people never think about is the logistics of any effort. They say 'oh lets by ship xyz, its got more bang for the buck' without ever thinking of such matters as can it handle the average distance between waves in a standard seastate, or does it have enough range for its duties. They also never think about spares, training issues, maintanance etc etc, let alone through life costs of any capital purchace.
You are right about the BB's, and thats why they were retired, simple economics.

[phongn]

Azeron, it would be most helpful if you actually quoted the parts that you're referring to.

Last i checked tank amrour (some sort of carbon mesh) was about 3-5 stronger than than steel.

Wrong once again. Tank armor is made out of steel and ceramics, with some tanks adding a depleted uranium mesh for additional protection.

So you are saying a 2000lb bomb could penetrate the equivilent of 16 feet of solid steal?

When did he say that? Sea Skimmer said that it could penetrate 60 inches or so of steel. Furthermore, how are you going to get all that composite armor (which is quite expensive) on a ship? It'd be incredible expensive and still won't protect its sensors.

Link on this topic: http://www.warships1.com/W-Tech/tech-081.htm

hmm thats hard to beleive, I would think that would take a major LOSAT weapon or a much heavier weapon to do that. I aggree, weapons that hit the deck would go through if the deck wasn't as heavily armoured as the sides. I was thinking of more like monitor deisgn.

But no-one is going to hit the side armor. They'll hit the deck armor or simply break the keel with a torpedo.

Why can;t a ship have heavy armour and excellent point defenses?

It can. It'd also be extremely expensive. Furthermore, you really need something like ESSM for decent defensive capabilities (rather than just bolting on SeaRAM launchers), which will further add to the cost and complexity of the ship.

And yes an IOWA class ship can stand up to sunburn and exocet missles.

No, it cannot stand up to the heavy Russian antiship missiles. Exocet, maybe, since that's a small one, but it'd mess up the stuff on deck.

How are you going to shield planes from EMP pules if your fighters are using radar which the pulse can use to ride into the rest of the plane? You could shield the cockpit, but that will darken the tint of the canopy and make it harder to see.

Or you could put a thin gold layer in the window (which they do). They can and are shielded from EMP - just because they have a radar reciever doesn't change that fact.

Helicopters? Are you serious, how are they going to stand up to hand held surface to air missles when you send them in waves? maybe if we only fight somalians or iraqis, but what about the chinese? those russian shoulder missles are leathal and really cheap.

Or have the helicopter stand off beyond SAM range and guide other SAMs in.

perhaps you misunderstand me when I talking about this versus relative firepower of carriers. I am just saying this is nice in addition to the force, not a replacement.

It would be. It's cost makes it unfeasable.

Being able to fire 16 '' shells will make sure an area is clear of enemies, because nothing can stadn up to it.

You could do the same with a B-52 raid, and 16" shells cannot kill everything (though most anything that's not a hardened bunkers). Plus, the BUFFs are already here.

You fly 10k feet up and look for something. like in kosovo it will probably be wooden replicass, and you will have wasted a million dollar missle on a hundred dollar replica.

I was not aware that LGBs and JDAM were million-dollar weapons.

Why not spend the money on something more valuealbe and leave the cheap stuff to artilery to area bombard?

You're still bombing decoys rather than something useful.

A hundred miles is a large operational area to work with extremely heavy artilery support.

100 miles? Try 20-30 miles - ERGM simply isn't here.

IOWA is a triple hulled wonder.

Source? I haven't heard this one before, I just wanted confirmation of this.

I think you should go talk to a grunt, what they think about airplanes vs heavy artilery. a shell from a 16 incher puts the feer of god into the enemy.

So we're going to fear now? I suppose a B-52 over him would also put the fear of God into him as well.

The Extended range artilery system can't even kill a tank from what I hear. Probably better ofgf sticking to a MRLS system instead.

Wrong. No tank can withstand a top-attack hit from artillery. MLRS cannot destroy tanks with its submunition rounds.

Granted you could buy a fleet of f/a-18's with the operational cost of a battleship, but try and field them, train the pit crews, support facitilites, radar, force protection. forget it if you weant to put it on a carrier. then the number goes down to what 2 or 3?

The 'pit crews', support facilities and such are already there. OTOH, if you want a battleship, you'll have to train the crew and might even have to purchase escorts for them, which is far more expensive.

I don;t think it would take a decade to produce 16'' tubes, we do have speicality large scale custom fabrication factories in the US.

But not capable of forging large rifles. That industry is long dead.

Perhaps i have similar feelings about the crusader. They cancelled it becasue it wasn't fast enough to get places. But you know what in many circumstances it is a really good piece of hardware to have. Instead of draeaming of what could be with tomorrows weapons, Ithink they passsed up on piece of hardware that would have done allot good in perviously unthought of positions.

It was a good artillery piece, but it had to go. That, and the military may be banking on US airpower to knock out enemy pieces with longer range. Finally, it may also believe that it will not be a useful investment if things like THEL proliferate.

[TrailerParkJawa]

Dang, I wish I had checked out the BBS this weekend !

There are lots of pros and cons so Im just gonna sum up some of mine:



Battleships in the role as queen of the seas are obsolete. Battleships in the role of providing NGS ( naval gunfire support ) are NOT OBSOLETE.
However, they are very expensive to maintain and have high crew requirements which are, in my opinion, the principle problems.

Putting 6 inch guns on modern vessels might be better than nothing, but remember that if you can hit the enemy with a 6 inch gun, they can hit you with theirs. The battleships can and have survived hits from larger caliber rounds. Modern ships like the OHP and Aegis class vessels might not sink from a 6 inch round, but they probably would have to be pulled out of the fight.

Someone mentioned the Princeton did not sink after hitting a mine. True, but she came pretty close and thats besides the point. The Princeton was out of the war. Disabling a vessel today is as good as sinking it.

Airpower cant replace on call artillery support for Marines close to shore.
Airplanes can be shot down, 16 inch rounds cant.

Few weapons platforms are so superior that they can completely supplant another. What I am trying to say is that the BB has weakness and strengths. Right now, the US Navy has piss poor NGS for the Marines. BB's can fill that role very well, the only question is our we willing to cough up the cash.

[RayCav of ASVS]

Wasn't the Monitor from the Civil War?

Anyway, what would be cool is a battleship/submarine. After I hit my head on a towel rack, I thought it could have the weapons of both sea vehicles, and could go hundreds of meters deeper than current nuclear submarines. Woud that ever work?

The civil war Monitor was basically a coast defense ship.

Derived from this, most armored coast defense ships ever since are referred to as Monitors.

During the WWI Dardenelles campagin, there arose a special need of shore bombardment ships. At first the British took expensive new-build cruiser hulls with massive 15 inch guns. However, these ships were of limited nature, so they went back to the monitor idea. Even though they were infact more limited in capability, they were far cheaper, being built on a 2,000 - 3,000 ton hull and mounting weapons from scrapped battleships. Typically, they were armed with a single 12- or 15-inch turret, and numerous small caliber guns (typically 3-pounders). One, HMS General Wolfe, was mounted with the 18-inch gun taken from HMS Furious, which was one of the first crusiers built for the Dardenelles campaign (the Furious was later converted to the famous carrier).

Although most were scrapped after the war, some were retained. These later were reactivated for WWII, with little or no modification (aside from bolt-down AAA).

And finally, there actually was a Battleship/Sub combo. Do a Google search on 8-inch gun French submarines of WWII:)

[RayCav of ASVS]

Dang, I wish I had checked out the BBS this weekend !

There are lots of pros and cons so Im just gonna sum up some of mine:



Battleships in the role as queen of the seas are obsolete. Battleships in the role of providing NGS ( naval gunfire support ) are NOT OBSOLETE.
However, they are very expensive to maintain and have high crew requirements which are, in my opinion, the principle problems.

Putting 6 inch guns on modern vessels might be better than nothing, but remember that if you can hit the enemy with a 6 inch gun, they can hit you with theirs. The battleships can and have survived hits from larger caliber rounds. Modern ships like the OHP and Aegis class vessels might not sink from a 6 inch round, but they probably would have to be pulled out of the fight.

Irrelevant. If you can hit them with anything, they can hit you with anything. It might not be artillery; it might be missiles, with ranges that approach dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers. And CIWS isn't much help against swarms of missiles, as the Reid and Stark proved.

A battleship may survive an Exocet. It may even survive a Sunburn. But can it survive a barrage of Sunburns?

Someone mentioned the Princeton did not sink after hitting a mine. True, but she came pretty close and thats besides the point. The Princeton was out of the war. Disabling a vessel today is as good as sinking it.

Wrong. It may be out of the fight, but you can use it for the next one. And it's still cheaper than having to build a new one.

Airpower cant replace on call artillery support for Marines close to shore.
Airplanes can be shot down, 16 inch rounds cant.

With the latest in defensive systems, they just might be possible to shoot down.

Few weapons platforms are so superior that they can completely supplant another. What I am trying to say is that the BB has weakness and strengths. Right now, the US Navy has piss poor NGS for the Marines. BB's can fill that role very well, the only question is our we willing to cough up the cash.

True, but even a Spruance can provide some gun support, and it usually is enough.

[LordChaos]

Right now, the US Navy has piss poor NGS for the Marines. BB's can fill that role very well, the only question is our we willing to cough up the cash.

Well, not realy. BBs don't realy fullfill the fire support role that well. It's just that everything else currently available is even worse at it then a BB.