Return of the Battleship?

[InsaneTD]

I'm curious about the power requirements. Would anything currently armed with 5" guns generate enough power to keep up a sustained bombardment? Or is it expected to only need to fire once every couple minutes as a target is identified?

[Borgholio]

They were talking about a shot every few seconds, but the railgun is so much more destructive than a 5" that they could probably fit a really small one if they can miniaturize the tech enough.

[Thanas]

In history of military technology has any weapon rendered obsolete ever came back ?

Heavy cavalry, the phalanx, the armored knight, the heavy galley and the tactical organization of the Roman Army (one might debate whether they were truly obsolete at any point but that is a bit like saying the US kept battleships if they should make a comeback).

[Sky Captain]

If railgun works as well as planned I think something similar to Russian Kirov class battlecruisers may get built. A large warship with one or two railgun turrets, powerful electric generators to run the railguns in addition to all other armament you have on a modern destroyer. An all railgun armed ship would have too narrow role to be as useful as ship armed for wide range of missions..

[Simon_Jester]

The Zumwalt-class destroyer[/i] (tipping the scales at around 14500 tons, much smaller than a Kirov) was essentially exactly this- in that it was designed with the electrical systems it would need to be modified to accomodate a railgun should one become available.

In history of military technology has any weapon rendered obsolete ever came back ?

Rams made a brief comeback in the 1850s, '60s, and '70s, between the invention of steam engines that could allow ships to charge each other and the invention of artillery shells powerful enough to sink any ship crazy enough to try for a ramming attack. And during that window of opportunity, ramming actually worked, sometimes and under certain conditions.

Multi-barreled machine guns made a comeback post-WWII after going out of style around World War I, because while they're big and clumsy, with electrically powered rotation systems they can achieve much higher rate of fire than any single-barrel weapon, and that matters for aircraft and anti-aircraft systems.

Rockets are a possible example, in that they were always a part of gunpowder warfare, but usually a very small and ineffectual part, from the early centuries of the second millennium AD onward. They were, in essence, "born obsolete." Until the 1940s, when advances in machining technology and rocket engine design made them truly practical and they became one of the most common forms of weapon for all sorts of purposes, in many ways a substitute for artillery.

I don't know what you have been reading but all use of these weapons is expected to use guided weapons except possibly very short range shipboard defensive which could be effective with some kind of shrapnel warhead.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/electromag ... -launcher/

http://www.onr.navy.mil/media-center/fa ... ilgun.aspx

Neither article mentions guided projectiles, and the Navy link actually mentions anti-ship combat. I agree that even a little bit of error at 200 miles will be quite a bit, but I expect they would have thought of that already.

If they want to sink ships from 200 miles away they will use a guided weapon. It doesn't matter what they do or do not mention; nobody even bothers trying to fire unguided weapons at serious warships anymore. To get close enough to hit with unguided weapons, you have to get close enough that they've already killed you with their guided weapons.

That is the dumbest response you could possibly have made. I thought it might prompt something rational, but I guess this is a complete waste of time,

How is that a dumb response? You asked me if it would be defined as a heavy cruiser due to it's size and the weight of it's shells. My answer is no, because the grading of light / standard / heavy / battle cruiser was based on the overall size of the vessel AND the guns it carried. That's why once they started switching to missiles instead of guns they got rid of all designations aside from the basic "cruiser"...which this one would be based on its size and armament compared to the smaller destroyers.

The thing is, 'cruiser' as a term originated with the ship's role, not with its armament or size relative to other ships.

The distinction between 'light' and 'heavy' cruisers was totally arbitrary and a side-effect of the Washington Naval Treat's arbitrary distinction between cruisers with 6" guns and cruisers with 8" guns; it was abolished as soon as the treaty regime ceased to matter- and pretty soon the 6" versus 8" gun distinction stopped mattering too.

So the basic point is that there's no sense in trying to resurrect an obsolete concept or name for a ship that bears only a very vague resemblance to its predecessor. We might as well call 19th century ironclads "galleys" because, unlike sailing ships but like oared warships, they could move in any direction independent of the wind.

Likewise, a ship with big honking cannons is not automatically in any meaningful sense a battleship, and calling a ship a battleship or saying the battleships have come back because there now exists a ship with big honking cannons (that work on totally different physical principles than historical battleship guns) just... doesn't work.

No, I said that the term "battleship" applied even to ships that don't meet your criteria of heavy guns, heavy armor and line of battle.

No ship was ever called a "battleship" that failed to meet those criteria. Only you are applying the term that way. So the question is, why not just call these new ships with their cannons "galleasses" or something similarly obscure, because a galleass is a ship with new unique cannon technology too! And frankly, a galleass has more in common with a WWI dreadnought in terms of the way it's used and operated in combat than the dreadnought has with a modern missile or railgun combatant.

I never said they died off because they were just used as escorts or for bombardment. They died off because the reach of their guns paled in comparison to carrier aircraft and they were way too big and costly to be just a missile boat. If the guns had a 200 mile range instead of just 25, things might have been different. And that's my point.

It was never that simple, and it's even less simple now because literally any ship can carry weapons quite capable of hitting other ships at 200 miles. Even ships far too small to mount any railgun now under consideration can do it.

If it is a large ship with large guns, I argue that it can be called battleship.

By the same argument it could be called a galleass, as galleasses were also large ships with large guns. Sure, that misses the fact that the galleass was 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than the modern ships we're talking about. Also the fact that it was powered by oars, but who cares about such petty details? That's about as irrelevant as the "armored" and "designed to be employed in line ahead along with other similarly armed ships" parts of a battleship's specifications.

You are arguing that it's still not a battleship because it doesn't have heavy armor or fight in a line of battle, even though not all battleships met either of those criteria. Ok fine, would you prefer calling it a battlecruiser then? Or just stick with the generic "cruiser"?

It would be profoundly healthier to come up with an entirely new and different characterization for the ship than to recycle an archaic one that is actually misleading.

"Frigate" was recycled in the modern era because "frigate" was seen as a role, not a technical specification: in the Age of Sail, it referred to a ship that can cruise, and which was powerful enough to contribute to a serious surface battle... but probably not powerful enough to win it without serious support. But "battleship" (and, again, "galleass") have so far not been recycled because they refer not just to a doctrinal role, but to specific details of the ship's layout and armament and capabilities that no longer apply.

How do I not understand it? We're talking about how to define a ship, and you yourself have said that the definition of ships has changed compared to what they were in WW2, and yet you say that a BS needs to ONLY be a big gun, heavy armor, line of battle warship and can't possibly be redefined to meet the modern example of a big gun warship.

If our 'big gun warship' is essentially identical to missile ships of the same tonnage except for carrying less missiles and more electromagnetic mass drivers... well, if it can claim to be a 'battleship,' why can't the missile ships make the same claim?

[Borgholio]

Simon, most of your post basically restated what Sea Skimmer said but in a less condescending tone, and you expanded on a few points that made more sense to me. Thank you for that. I still have one question though:

If our 'big gun warship' is essentially identical to missile ships of the same tonnage except for carrying less missiles and more electromagnetic mass drivers... well, if it can claim to be a 'battleship,' why can't the missile ships make the same claim?

The one reason why I argued for a re-definition of the term "battleship" was because it seems (to me at least) that current naval terms were substantially re-defined compared to their 19th and 20th century counterparts. As an example, the Arleigh Burke class destroyers and Zumwalts are actually heavier ships than the Ticonderoga class cruiser. There really is no functional difference between the two classes anymore. My question is, what school of thought or logic applies to designating a ship class these days? Certain things like carriers and amphibious assault ships are obvious but where do you meaningfully draw the line between a cruiser and a destroyer? Or is the Navy (seemingly) just calling every large escort-size warship a destroyer and leaving it at that?

[Simon_Jester]

The Navy is more or less arbitrarily calling all its heavy surface combatants destroyers and all its light surface combatants frigates.

The "cruiser" designation is a holdover; the term made relatively large amounts of sense during the early and mid-Cold War, when a considerable number of the actual ships were holdovers from WWII or shortly thereafter, and when there were WWII-vintage political constraints that made it... prudent to have some ships around and call them 'cruisers.'

But as the minimum systems requirement for an adequate 'destroyer' capable of performing its mission increased, the destroyers got big enough that the 'cruiser' was basically just an overloaded destroyer.

Modern USN destroyers are about as big a surface combatant as anyone in the world has been able to demonstrate a real need for. Every weapon known to be effective against warships can fit on a hull that size, except maybe the very largest Soviet-style antiship missiles (and it's debateable whether one or two of those are more effective than, oh, eight or twelve Harpoon missiles). Or the Chinese antiship ballistic missiles, which are as yet pretty much an untried concept.

The "destroyer" name is applied because the "destroyer" classification is in fact a direct lineage from the WWII-era destroyers: fast fleet escorts with powerful AA armament. The difference is that they went from AA guns to a handful of 'arm' launched AA missiles to batteries of VLS missiles supported by ever-increasing radar capability... which in turn meant making the ships larger and larger.

However, each destroyer class is a clear and logical successor from the one before it in a straightforward, linear evolution. You can even find weird one-offs and 'missing link' ships where one or two ships were modified experimentally with hardware we normally associate with the generation of ships that came after it.

To a lesser extent, the Ticonderogas are also a direct linear evolution from the old WWII cruiser classes, and you can again trace the process by which missile armament came to replace guns, and by which a surface combatant's most important single combat system arguably became its radar mounts rather than its main battery.

However, as became clear with the Burkes and the Ticonderogas, there is now little functional difference between 'cruisers' and 'destroyers' because ALL modern naval surface combatants have converged on the same basic design: powerful air defense radars and missiles, respectable capacity for antiship or cruise missiles for attacking surface targets, a couple of helipads, and probably some antisubmarine warfare capability.

There is little sense in bothering to design serious surface combatants too light to carry all those things... but there is also little sense in bothering to design them bigger than they have to be to carry all those things, because the combination of advanced electronics and hardware is ruinously expensive, and it's very hard to keep up a navy that has enough ships to physically place one in every place where a ship is needed if you start making the ships more costly than they have to be.

So a 20000 or 30000-ton ship or whatever this is functionally a 'triple Ticonderoga' in terms of its firepower and systems might be very dangerous individually. But there's no real advantage to building it compared to building three Ticonderogas for the same cost.

Convergent evolution has therefore caused the destroyers and cruisers to become identical, more or less, and so the Navy is in the process of dropping the cruiser designation as redundant.
_________________

The frigates are not a linear evolution from Age of Sail frigates, meanwhile; that is a case of a term being specifically resurrected to talk about a class of ship lighter than the destroyers of its age, but still reasonably potent in combat- just not powerful enough to provide the kind of area-defense antiair coverage people look for from a 'destroyer,' or really major attacks against surface targets. Arguably the new littoral combat ships are a conceptual evolution of frigates, but they were originally identified as a different and revolutionary concept and therefore designated differently, with a name that basically just describes their mission.

Likewise, a modern "battleship" would not be a linear evolution from any historical battleship. It would be, in essence, a very very big guided missile destroyer/cruiser, scaled up presumably in order to carry some kind of very bulky weapon that would not fit on a smaller platform. It would not share design legacy with battleships, it would not be able to make much practical use of any experience with or lessons learned from battleships. Tactical doctrine for the "big honking missile thing" would bear no resemblance to the proper doctrine for using battleships.

So... why call it a battleship, unless you're trying to get fanboys excited about it?

[Beowulf]

Back when the Tico's were designed, one of the major things they had that guided missile destroyers did not, was improved command and control, in order to control the air battle for a carrier battlegroup. I would dispute that the Tico's were a lineal descendant from the earlier cruisers, however. They are based on a Spruance hull, and are descended from destroyers.

[Sea Skimmer]

In fact the first several Ticonderogas were approved and funded as DDG-47 ect.. then redesignated CG-47 ect.. just days before the first hull was laid down. This is why the first Burke is DDG-51, as the USN was then allowed to go back to what it actually wanted to do afterwards. Congressional politics at work, coming about five years after the USN ressurected the cruiser designation to shut up critics about how its frigates were eight thousand tons, and the Soviets had all these 'cruisers' around.

For bonus win, that DDG series of number actually started out as DLG (frigate) numbering, until the 1975 redesignation abolished all the rational USN designations in favor of RAR CRUISERS AND DESTROYERS! So we only have a Tico 'cruiser' because of twice over political dumbshittery in the span of five years.

The difference between a Burke and a Tico could easily have been greater though, if you look at the design studies in the program as documented in Friedman's US Destroyers the Burke as built ended up at the extremely high end of those studies, but as it was the USN wanted the highest end possible ship because it was under no actual delusion that a real cruiser-destroyer difference existed, and it was clear by the later 1980s that only one major escort class would be built in the future. And then the Flight III Burke studies became as big as a Tico anyway, but we got Flight IIA instead for reasons of the peace dividend.

Present USN long term budget planning makes no distinction between cruisers and destroyers, and typically just refers to 'battleforce combattants' as a single monolithic thing going towards the 2030s. Which is as it should be. Though it would have been better had the 1960s naming kept going, big task force escorts would be frigates with some actual link to the original sail frigates in terms of role, while small escorts just get called Ocean Escorts. LCS is a reversion of this in its own right, call the ship type after what it's supposed to do, not nostalgia.

The last ship the USN built that was descended from an actual WW2 cruiser in any relevant detail was Long Beach. Everything else was completely new from the keel up, this occurred several times in the Cold War as hull design underwent rethinkings due to how different demands are. First with the nuclear fast task force escorts and conventionally fired equivalents, then again with Burke and then DDG-1000 yet again.

An example of the implications/need for rethinking was gun type warships needed serious amounts of volumn in the ends for magazines, while most missile ships did not, but the missile era ships needed far more electrical power which required bigger machinery spaces, in some cases much bigger on smaller hulls. Cruising speeds went up to match the carriers increasing sustained speeds, length became more important then displacement, topweight skyrocketed ect.. and the very hull steels changed as did the nature of powerplants.

Rocket Cutter remains the best designation ever meanwhile. Bless the Soviets for fully applying a rationalized system to all this. I am not sure if the modern Russian fleet still does so. Japan meanwhile doesn't use the frigate designation, and just has destroyers and destroyer escorts, which is another fairly rational approach to take.

[Simon_Jester]

Back when the Tico's were designed, one of the major things they had that guided missile destroyers did not, was improved command and control, in order to control the air battle for a carrier battlegroup. I would dispute that the Tico's were a lineal descendant from the earlier cruisers, however. They are based on a Spruance hull, and are descended from destroyers.

I sit corrected.

The last ship the USN built that was descended from an actual WW2 cruiser in any relevant detail was Long Beach. Everything else was completely new from the keel up, this occurred several times in the Cold War as hull design underwent rethinkings due to how different demands are. First with the nuclear fast task force escorts and conventionally fired equivalents, then again with Burke and then DDG-1000 yet again.

Well, what I mean is that you can observe some kind of evolutionary process- introduction of missiles, optimization for missiles, and so on. You don't just have "first there were the WWII gun cruisers, then nothing for thirty years, then BAM! the Virginias."

Whereas here there'd be "first there were the Iowas, then nothing for seventy years, then BAM! the ships we inexplicably call 'battleships' even though the only thing they really have in common with said Iowas is their size..."

[Sky Captain]

Modern USN destroyers are about as big a surface combatant as anyone in the world has been able to demonstrate a real need for. Every weapon known to be effective against warships can fit on a hull that size, except maybe the very largest Soviet-style antiship missiles (and it's debateable whether one or two of those are more effective than, oh, eight or twelve Harpoon missiles). Or the Chinese antiship ballistic missiles, which are as yet pretty much an untried concept.

Assuming railgun becomes available would there be need for larger ships to effectively take advantage of railgun if existing missile armament and other systems remains the same? Railgun will need a lot of electricity requiring larger machinery rooms and large capacitor banks that take up space. Some space savings will come from smaller magazines because only projectiles will be stored while propellant will be replaced with diesel fuel for electric generators.
Railgun likely will be used more than currently existing guns because of far greater range, why shoot a million dollar missile when railgun projectile costing maybe few thousand dollars can do the same job, so it is conceivable that railguns will be given higher priority than existing gun systems meaning there may be ships with two or more railgun turrets. If other armament isn't changed then ships will have to become bigger to carry all the extra railgun stuff.

[InsaneTD]

They also need replacement rails unless they have solved the issue of rail abrasion.

[Simon_Jester]

Assuming railgun becomes available would there be need for larger ships to effectively take advantage of railgun if existing missile armament and other systems remains the same? Railgun will need a lot of electricity requiring larger machinery rooms and large capacitor banks that take up space. Some space savings will come from smaller magazines because only projectiles will be stored while propellant will be replaced with diesel fuel for electric generators.

The most likely change is that ships will be adapted to divert main engine power to their electrical systems, which doesn't take up much extra space. You might see a slight increase to accomodate railguns, but it's going to be incremental (i.e. 500 tons heavier) not massive (i.e. 20000 tons heavier). If it takes 20000 tons of ship to make the railgun work, it's not going to be worth anyone's trouble to build ships with that capability.

Railgun likely will be used more than currently existing guns because of far greater range, why shoot a million dollar missile when railgun projectile costing maybe few thousand dollars can do the same job, so it is conceivable that railguns will be given higher priority than existing gun systems meaning there may be ships with two or more railgun turrets. If other armament isn't changed then ships will have to become bigger to carry all the extra railgun stuff.

Railguns entail high barrel wear and may not be as cheap to maintain as one thinks. Their projectiles are likely to be smaller, less capable and less flexible than a missile.

[sarevok2]

USN seem confident they can test the railgun at sea on a real vessel by 2015. How did they solve the barrel erosion problem ?

[Borgholio]

USN seem confident they can test the railgun at sea on a real vessel by 2015. How did they solve the barrel erosion problem ?

I can't find any articles specifically on how they did that. Might be a secret. We can presume they either are using a highly resistant alloy for the rails, using some kind of protective coating that can be easily re-applied (spray-on teflon, for instance), or they're using a sabot casing that is made of a softer material than the rails.

Edit - In regards to a previous discussion point, looks like the railgun shells cost about $25k each and DO include basic guidance. More advanced guidance appears to be planned:

http://defensetech.org/2014/01/16/navy- ... g-promise/

[InsaneTD]

My understanding is that the rail erosion is caused by arcing as the round travels down the rails. The theory I heard is that it basically just welds, breaks the weld, and such as it continues down the rails.

[Simon_Jester]

At 25000 dollars they're cheaper than a missile but not vastly so.

[Borgholio]

Depends on the missile. If you consider the cost of a Tomahawk ($1.5 million) then it's a hell of a bargain. Harpoons range from $500k to $2m depending on who you ask, but that's still a minimum of 20 times more expensive. I think those are the two main missiles that a ship-mounted railgun would need to compete with.

[LaCroix]

With 25nm range for a Harpoon, a railgun COULD actually make sense - that's almost point blank range for such a system, and the slug will travel at roughly Mach 7 (~10 times the speed of the Harpoon missile). That's like 20 seconds to impact.

With 32 MJ of muzzle energy (about 8kg TNT) they are a bit more powerful than a 155mm hit

To a modern hull, this would certainly cause damage . And it will wreak havok on anything on the superstructure.

A Harpoon, with 220 kg of TNT will do much more damage per hit, but with 3-4 minutes to target, you have more time to do something against it.

Apart from the fact that if a modern vessel lets any enemy vessel close up to Harpoon Range, something has gone very, very wrong, I'd say that modern VLS systems can certainly deal with Harpoon. That's basically what they've been invented for, and then refined to what they are now.

I can't say, though, if a VLS SM-3 type interceptor is able to intercept a very small Mach 7 low altitude projectile at short range (<20 seconds from firing to impact) with reasonable probability. That's about the worst possible case for such a system

[Borgholio]

I thought the Harpoon was almost 70nm range?

[LaCroix]

I thought the Harpoon was almost 70nm range?

It has. I messed up composing the message and didn't notice.

What I wanted to write was something like

"Within visual range - about 25nm for a ship, compared to a Harpoon, a railgun COULD actually make sense..."

[Borgholio]

Yeah within visual range a railgun shell would hit a target at the horizon in 13 seconds at Mach 7 speeds. If the accuracy is comparable, I can't see any advantage the Harpoon has over a railgun aside from maybe being able to fit Harpoons on ships too small to fit a railgun. Tomahawk still has a major advantage in range though, nearly 1,000 miles.

[LaCroix]

The Harpoon does have an advantage in terms of mid-range engagement. At higher distances, the railgun shell (coming in at a ballistic trajectory with only minimal corrections by the guidance) is just a targeting exercise for a SM-3. A Harpoon with counter-countermeasures and sea-skimming trajectory has a much better chance to actually hit the target.

And yes, the Tomahawk (and aircraft) was what I had in mind when I spoke about things must have been going wrong. An actual Harpoon missile exchange is the marine equivalent to a knife fight these days.

[Borgholio]

Good point about the Harpoon's ability to maneuver, I forgot about that. There's a new advanced long-range anti-ship missile due to roll out later this year with a 200nm range, but I wonder why we didn't do it sooner? Or was the Harpoon's range fine for what we needed up until now?

[Captain Seafort]

Good point about the Harpoon's ability to maneuver, I forgot about that. There's a new advanced long-range anti-ship missile due to roll out later this year with a 200nm range, but I wonder why we didn't do it sooner? Or was the Harpoon's range fine for what we needed up until now?

Presumably. TASM, IIRC, was up to 250nm.