44 replies to this topic

[tank50us]

2006 was a sad year for the BB enthusiests, the Iowa Class battleships, the last class ever built, were retired after 64yrs of service. However, they are all still technically property of the US Navy, and if called on, can be brought back to service yet again. In my oppinion, I feel they should be, since nothing on earth can top their main battery, nine 16" Main Guns, one salvo from them will convince anyone to throw down their weeapons. Heck, in 1991 Iraqi soldiers were surrendering to the drones that were launched from the Missouri and Wisconsin, since they knew what was on the other side of those antennas. Death, from over the horizon.

[Sgt. Rho]

Same here. Theres nothing, not even nuke subs or carriers that can top the awesomeness of battleships

[Shirou]

They are absolutely awesome, as well as absolutely owned by any modern air-to-ground fighter. Not to mention ballistic missiles.

The precision of aircraft and missiles have pushed Battleships obsolete, unfortunately. Equally, large scale naval warfare is something that isn't to be expected in the war on terrorism.

One thing I could see use for with these things is put them in front of the coast of Somalia. Those pirates out there should feel pretty warned by then...

[Colonel of the Cones]

Have they really gone though? The proposed US Arsenal ship, I would say is something of a modern successor. The increasing array of surface attack munitions carried by frigates/destroyers/cruisers easily gives the old Battleships a run for their money. The Royal Navy (and US Navy I think as well) are planning to install 155mm guns to their ships, which combined with modern autoloaders and munitions, gives them the far superior fire power to a conventional land based artillery gun.

[partyzanpaulzy]

Well I have heard that Russian frigate - which is going (sailing) toward that Ukrainian ship stranded by pirates on-board at Somalia with 7 US Cruisers around;
is so heavilly armed that this Neustrashimyj (= Dreadnought) ship can sent all these ships to the bottom.
It's the only Russian frigate of this class (maybe not for long time), but it is so heavilly armed with so dangerous missiles.
This Ukrainian cargo ship (full of Ukrainian weapons for unofficial South Sudan government) has been sent there by Yuschenko and this is one of his problems BTW...
It's one ship that can sink 7 US cruisers on large distance, probably larger than those 155mm cannons of the battleship could have.
Moskito anti-ship missile has range around 250 kms and speed is 3 Machs!!!
Russian Navy is poor, because it's full of outdated and poorly armed ships, but some of them are modern and heavilly armed.
I have heard US Navy focuses on partly stealth, multirole destroyers like is San Antonio class (helipad on the back, Tomahawk silos, small cannon in the front,...), British Navy tries to build fast pentamarans. Modern conflicts are assymetrical and if you need hunt down some pirates in boats, you'll need rather small ships with heavy armament rather than slow battleships with large defence strength and armament. The NATO will need to use these ships rather than floating bases like battleship or aircraft carriers* are.

* VTOL aircraft like F-35 needs just helipad and some fuel storages (probably starter cables and some mechanics), there are tendentions to keep only several aircraft carriers if I remember well

[CommanderJB]

Aftershock, on 15 Oct 2008, 6:11, said:

They are absolutely awesome, as well as absolutely owned by any modern air-to-ground fighter. Not to mention ballistic missiles.

The precision of aircraft and missiles have pushed Battleships obsolete, unfortunately. Equally, large scale naval warfare is something that isn't to be expected in the war on terrorism.

One thing I could see use for with these things is put them in front of the coast of Somalia. Those pirates out there should feel pretty warned by then...

While there is more that I can say (and, to be true to form, I will) Aftershock's post does sum it up pretty well. Within visual range naval combat faded with the emergence of the aircraft carrier and disappeared with the anti-ship missile. Using guns is no longer a valid option for engaging other naval vessels in combat; instead, they retain their use as multi-purpose weapons, engaging smaller asymmetrical targets (illegal/enemy civilan shipping, terrorist/insurgent/enemy light craft etc.), aircraft (yes, really; a British frigate shot down an Argentine jet with her 4.5in gun during the Falklands war, and on Australa's Adelaide-class the gun atop the superstructure - odd place - is almost entirely restricted to this role thanks to a lack of significant depression capability. The turrets are fully automated and connected to fire control radars, so all the Weapons System Operator in the command centre has to do is point and shoot with a joystick, and often not even this, with some mountings offering fully automatic target engagement a la Phalanx-type CIWS systems), and providing shore bombardment capability. It's this last capability which makes them an interesting subject in terms of relevance to modern war.
The battleship has actually come full circle. In the Crimean War the French made use of some of the first things to be considered predecessors to the battleship in her more mature forms, armour-plated 'floating batteries' which used iron casemates over the gun decks, which also made one of the first uses of the explosive shell in a naval setting. With the Gloire, they came swiftly to prominence as true naval combat ships, and from the Warrior onwards dominated the oceans for centuries, culminating in the behemoths of the Second World War, the Iowa, North Carolina, Bismarck, King George V, Dunkerque and of course, grand-daddy of them all, Yamato class vessels. These ruled the waves unquestioningly until the Japanese demonstrated their utter vulnerability to air attacks on the King George V-class battleship HMS Prince of Wales and heavy cruiser HMS Repulse in 1941. Both British capital ships were sunk, with terrible loss of life, in a matter of minutes by an organised attack by multiple Japanese bombers and torpedo aircraft, as they passed through South East Asia on a mission that was supposed to be a show of strength. The Battle of Taranto in the same year proved beyond doubt that aircraft offered a range ability that there was no way Battleships would ever match, and for the rest of the war their usage declined steadily, with many being sunk and most of the rest of the ships on order cancelled. While they continued to operate with fleets until the end of the war, and in some cases in the Pacific did manage to engage enemy vessels with their guns, which quickly demolished anything in their way, their primary uses were as command centres and large-scale flak platforms, a far cry from their original intended use as the main strike element of the fleet. Another thing worth mentioning is the German plans for two nameless leviathans, mounting twenty-inch guns, at double the tonnage of the Yamato-class (themselves far eclipsing their nearest rivals); but Hitler's decision to bring forward the war from his original target date of 1941 ensured that they would remain only a terrible dream.
In many ways it's surprising just how fast they went; in 1939 they still represented the nucleus of every fleet and the most destructive weapons of their age, but less than twenty years later, all but the Iowas had been scrapped and even the Iowas themselves had been mothballed.
This brings me to the last stage of the history lesson. The Korean war highlighted the fact that despite the supreme power of naval aviation against naval targets, using them in protracted ground campaigns was expensive, difficult, time-inefficient and vulnerable to a heavy anti-aircraft environment. With this in mind the US government reactivated the Iowas, fitting them with modern fire control systems and other miscellaneous upgrades, and sent them off to Vietnam to blast the hell out of any Viet Cong within forty klicks of the shore. You see, nine 16-inch guns (that's 406mm, or double the size of the largest artillery piece in service today, the 2S7 Pion SPG) are remarkably good at leaving a lot of craters. Aircraft can do this too, but in the end it all comes down to economics; shells are cheap. A cruise missile costs millions of dollars, and even an aircraft dropping dumb bombs will accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of maintenance, training, weapons and fuel costs with each sortie. And with that many turrets, there's no way you're going to get a bigger volume of explosives out faster. They proved their worth nicely and were also extremely convenient to mothball and then reactivate when needed as the underlying technology was simple but durable. The first Gulf War was their swan-song, but here they didn't do so well, because even equipped with TLAMs and yet more electronics, the range of their guns limited them to a very few operations.
When it comes to fire support, the battleship always has and always will rule supreme. The problem is that building and maintaining things that big just for one single job, littoral bombardment, is simply impractical. The Marine Corps love them, because there's nothing better to land under the protection of; they wanted to keep them on standby, but eventually a fifty-year-old ship became impractical to keep going. They've been promised the support of the Zumwalt-class' railguns instead, but even then they won't have that sort of firepower volume capability, and while I think we'll see uses yet for naval gun platforms, it probably won't be for a long time. Range will always be the issue and it's here that the railguns show the way forward; developments of base-bleed and rocket-assisted projectiles will also work, albeit to a lesser degree. But we'll never see true 'battleships' again, I think. (N.b. the Arsenal Ship never made it beyond the conceptual stage, not even getting to the drawing board. VLS on modern warships give you the capability to deliver as many TLAMs as you need from a multi-role combatant - there's no reason to build a huge, expensive giant just for this purpose. The Kirov-class is an exception to this as it is a true multi-role warship which makes good use of its size to get the maximum value out of possible missile systems and targeting gear, such as navalised S-300s and the carriage of multiple large anti-submarine missiles in addition to AShMs, whereas it usually has to be one or the other.)

Phew! Sorry, couldn't help it. As I mentioned in my thread (which I will update, honest... soon) I am a bit of a battleship nut, you see. Most of you probably know most of that, but I just couldn't resist the temptation to give a potted history to support my evaluations.

And now to partyzanpaulzy's post. The Neustrashmiy is a frigate. The Russian Navy's most modern frigate, true, but nonetheless, it's a small and relatively dated design. The P-270 Moskit has been around for a long time; thirty or so years in fact, and while it's still considered to be a big threat, the more recent introductions of SEA-RAM, ESSM and AEGIS-guided Standard missiles mean that they're no longer weapons against which there is little defence. The United States vessels will be better equipped, better manned and with more modern weaponry. Unfortunately Russia's navy hasn't fared so well, taking the brunt of the post-Soviet break-up losses, and while it's beginning to get back on its feet it's still a long way from being able to match the U.S. one-to-one, let alone taking into account the U.S. Navy's massive numerical superiority. In twenty years I expect the situation to be more balanced, but even at it's height, I don't think the Soviet Navy would have defeated NATO's maritime forces in a hot Cold War.
Simply it's a fairly nasty warship, especially for a frigate, but there's no way it'd defeat any equivalent U.S. vessel, let alone multiple ones which are both larger and more modern. But if you'd given the Kirov-class as an example, now that'd have been more interesting, particularly taking into account modernisation possibilities...

I shall leave you with this, as a reminder of just why there's no better way to reduce a coastal target to so much rubble:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...wa_bb-61_pr.jpg

Edited by CommanderJB, 15 October 2008 - 10:32.

[Cuppa]

I toured an Iowa class battleship, the New Jersey to be specific. Although the Iowa class was retried, you have the DD(X) to look forward too. Even though its considered a destroyer, its very much like a battleship.

Edited by Cuppa, 15 October 2008 - 23:15.

[CommanderJB]

Well... not really. It's pretty dissimilar in operation; even with its railgun for naval targets it will only ever use the missiles carried inside its VLS cells, and my definition of a battleship at least is a fleet's leading combatant unit which uses guns as the primary method of engaging targets. The railgun is really only there for offshore fire support, and even then it will still carry land attack missiles.

[tank50us]

Dang Commander, long post. I too am a BB Nut, and I feel the retirement of the Iowas was a mistake. But, I must say to the carrier/Guided Missile [ship-type here] nuts, is that missiles and aircraft can be shot down, a big-bullet can't (well, if you have a THEL you can, but good luck affording one). And when the navies run out of missiles, just like the dogfighters of Vietnam, they'll have to settle it the old-fashioned way, with their guns. Which as it stands, yes, it is unlikely that too navies will be forced to square-off in surface warfare. However, as I said it is only unlikely, NOT impossible. Several countries have the naval power, and have played 'sailer' with eachother (think Operation Redflag with ships rather then tanks and planes), but only with one or two ships at a time, and usually with picket-ships rather then capital ships. According to Wikipedia, the only thing that can match one salvo from an Iowa Class is a B-52 just dropping iron, and while that Bomber is certainly convincing, having that same impact again, and a again, and again, will make you decide that surrender is a good option, something that bombers just can't do. I will admit that Battleships are expensive, (what capital ship isn't) and limited by the range of their guns, however there are new technoligies that can increase the range and accuracy of the guns; like new rounds, new powder, new gun dirrectors, and even new barrels.

Now to bring up one of the reasons for this thread.

I am planning a game for the near future, "Tides of War", which is set in an alternate 2008 where the ice caps are gone (melted), and the water levels have risen 500ft above normal. The major combatants are the United States, European Union, Russia, Japan, and China. In this game, if the faction has a battleship, will you deploy it, or stick with carriers and missile ships. Also, the US WILL be using an updated Iowa Class (with 8 ships instead of the current 4), and the Japanese will use a modernized Yamato Class (will disclose details later), currently, the Russians, EU, and China do not have a Battleship, Battlecruiser, or Battlecarrier type ship class, so, Later, I'll let you guys decide what capital ships you want to see them use. but thats for the future .

[Cuppa]

CommanderJB, on 15 Oct 2008, 20:57, said:

Well... not really. It's pretty dissimilar in operation; even with its railgun for naval targets it will only ever use the missiles carried inside its VLS cells, and my definition of a battleship at least is a fleet's leading combatant unit which uses guns as the primary method of engaging targets. The railgun is really only there for offshore fire support, and even then it will still carry land attack missiles.

But it still has a pretty strong cannon armament. 16 rounds per minute, per gun.

[CommanderJB]

I most certainly don't argue that nothing can match a salvo from the Iowa's guns; this is entirely true, and like I said, if littoral bombardment is your game, it's utterly unbeatable. The simple fact of the matter is though that this is the only game they're good at any more. A supercarrier can sink a fleet by itself days before said fleet would ever get within gun range, as the NATO Teamwork series of exercises showed in stark detail. Even if you take aircraft out of the equation AShMs will always surpass the range of the biggest gun; you'd have to quadruple the range of a naval turret, and ballistic performance is finite even with the most modern round and gun technology, before it would match AShM ranges from twenty years ago. Indeed you can shoot down an AShM, but it's worth noting that to get a shell's range to a useful degree would involve restricting warhead weight, not a huge problem given the shockingly bad damage control abilities on modern warships, so part of your firepower advantage, already limited by the giant third-of-a-tonne warhead weights on missiles like the P-270 (and also remember that the Exocet which hit the HMS Sheffield didn't even have to go off to sink it) is eaten away.
The one naval combat scenario I can see a battleship's gun's being useful in is when they are combined with stealth about fifty years into the future, and also submersible technology. Because railgun projectiles are virtually impossible to counter by any method and I would suspect will remain so for at least half a century, if you can sneak into range then this will give you a significant edge over a missile cruiser. The shell would need to be passively (probably satelltite) guided because even though their range is shorter and velocity faster than a missile they will still have an air time of many minutes, so theoretically a jamming system might be able to defeat an extended-range projectile, but of course the problem would be magnitudes higher for any form of missile system.
I would theorise that a railgun-equipped stealth craft, and possibly a submarine like a modern version of the HMS M2 or the French Surcouf would be the only useful application of a gun in a future naval engagement. Anything else will always be killed long before it can approach maximum range.

[Zaho]

I wanna suggest a theory about the future of the battleship. In a book I read about a ship called the "Gibraltar" from the modern US navy. Equipped with both gun turrets and a hangar for "harriers" and naval helicopters. The Russians have blueprints for a behemoth class of this type of a ship (with the weight of a giant oil tanker). Capable to fulfill both purposes in providing air and ground support for advancing troops. My point is that MAYBE in the future battleships and carriers will be combined as one.
After all a carrier cannot defend itself from close ranged enemies and if too close to the shore, it may be vulnerable to close range missile and artillery strikes as well as a below radar air assault. Submarines are well known to be the biggest threat to aircraft carriers and alike since they can approach stealthily and be detected too late if not at all. Cruisers and frigates are unable to handle the role of offshore battery effectively. And if patrolling alone and not in squadrons they are easy prey for jets.

[Shirou]

If you guys are such Battleship Nuts then go play Navyfield.

I play it for nearly a year now, and even though I recently restarted because of the EU version of it (no more laggy American servers), I'm going pretty well. Game contains all major battleships from the four major nations (Germany, US, Britain and Japan) from WWII and also a lot of hypothetical ships, such as the entire Plan Z (H44 Battleship for the win) or the Montana class battleship, the proposed follow up of the Iowa.
Only a shame the graphics suck so bad. That's from before the millenium.

Enough advertisement

Edited by Aftershock, 17 October 2008 - 20:24.

[tank50us]

Zaho, tjat type of warship you describe is called a battlecarrier, they combine all the fire-power of both a Battleship, and an Aircraft Carrier. But even these ships have draw backs, most notably being that they can't carry the heavier 'standard' fixed-wing fighters, only VTOLs. And I do plan to have BCVs in Tides, the Russians will use an advanced varient of Kiev Class, and the Japanese will have one too (still yet to be named)

[Shirou]

Those things aren't new



WW2 CVE, carrier battleship hybrid.

[CommanderJB]

What an odd design. The turret layout is reminiscent of the old Dreadnoughts (and evidently with good reason - I just checked and she was initially built in 1920, which surprised me). A fairly useless conversion IMO. That flight deck is far too small to operate a fighter complement large enough to make any sort of contribution to its effectiveness that would offset the deck space lost, and we all know just how good seaplanes are at aerial combat; as most of the other WWII battleships proved quite well they're great for target spotting but that's about it. The only reason it's half-size is because they ran out of time and materials to do the whole ship, like they did to a stack of their other battleships.

Edited by CommanderJB, 18 October 2008 - 09:03.

[Zaho]

From the design I saw that the ship didn't have any defenses on its rear which is where enemies will try to attack it. I discussed this topic with a friend of mine who is a maniac on the topic of naval warfare, he told me that the Russians still use heavy cruisers and battleships in the arctic fleets, but primarily as mobile command stations rather than combat units.

tank50us you are right, battle carriers or assault carriers, have many drawbacks, however it is the only way to revive the battleships in the 21st century. Future jets probably won't require a runway and it will be more possible for the use of such ships. I recall from star wars where battleships were carriers too, however, space warfare remains only a fiction, however, in the far future capital ships will be the backbone of every fleet.

An interesting fact is that battleships and heavy cruisers were outdated when subs were able to launch nukes from below surface, before that, such heavy weapons were possible to be utilized by the battleships alone.

[tank50us]

actually, for a long time there were only two ways of delivering a nuke, by land (an ICBM) and by Air (a bomber), it took a while to make the ICBM small enough to fit in a submarine (I've been on a boomer back when my ol'man was in, there's not much space)

[CommanderJB]

Not necessarily true. As Upshot-Knothole showed, they have long been able to be delivered by shells or ground-to-ground rockets, and most of Russia's artillery guns inherited from the Soviet Union maintain this capability, especially the big ones like the 2S7 Pion and 2S4 Tsyulpan mortar. There's no particular reason why you couldn't fire a nuclear shell from a battleship; but then there's no particular reason why you would, either, given you could drop it from an aircraft carrier-launched bomber plane at ten times the range and with no risk to the rest of your fleet.
The arrival of SSBNs wasn't the death knell of the battleship; as has been said multiple times this was the arrival of the aircraft carrier, which could sink a battleship long before the battleship ever knew there was one around. Submarines contributed to this, but only in part as ASW techniques eventually caught up with them. SSBNs made redundant the intercontinental strategic bomber for the nuclear role, though they still have utility over shorter ranges thanks to their flexibility as either a cruise missile launch platform or a 'bomb truck'.
The 'Assault Carrier' argument isn't one I see as being particularly useful. As the USSR found out with the Kiev-class, trying to combine both tends to mean you get the worst of both worlds; a ship with bad sea-keeping and insufficient independent armament for the surface combatant role, and a platform with too little deck space, inconvenient control placement, and heavy limits on the types and loadouts of aircraft that can be operated in the aviation role. Even Britain's Invincible-class showed that 'pocket carriers', while having their uses for VTOL, don't match up to anything like the effectiveness of a full-sized design; they just can't operate enough aircraft. While I think aircraft carriers should be much more heavily armed than they are at the moment, primarily with defensive systems and CIWS units (I mean, 3 Phalanxes to protect the whole carrier? What were they thinking?), there's no use in having offensive armament if you carry enough aircraft to be genuinely useful. Also VTOL aircraft will never outperform CTOL aircraft (they simply can't - the lift engines will always detrimentally affect weight, manoeuvrability and cruise performance), so the CATOBAR design will be around for a while yet.
Lastly Russia no longer uses battleships or primarily gun-armed vessels of any kind, though the Soviet Union did keep the Sverdlov-class heavy gun cruisers in service far longer than any other navy, where they were as you say used as command ships, test platforms for weapons such as new SAM systems and later training vessels (thanks to the fact that battleships and gun-armed vessels are also highly crew-intensive).

[Zaho]

Crew, yeah, there is the problem. A frigate requires how much 200-300 people, and a battleship is like 2000-3000 ( not sure about that) an Arizona class Battleship had nearly 1700. The only way to combine a battleship and a carrier to the optimum is to build some sort of a hyper-capital ship to meet both maximum requirements. However, it is gonna require at least 5000 if not much more crew members and will be an easy target even for a ballistic missile. It will cost significant resources to build, as well as time, funds and it will have poor maneuverability.

However, if a battleship is build for an other purpose rather than a bad carrier, off shore artillery platform and command station, then probably it will be a good idea (of course we do nothing but debating on this matter, there is nothing we can do). To be honest I am out of any ideas.

For the Bulgarian Naval forces a Drzki class warship served for 68 years (1911 - 1979). In 1913 it had sunk 3 Turkish destroyers and 1 cruiser. In WWII after Bulgaria Joined side of the Soviets, it participated in the eradication of the German U-Boats in the Black Sea. This is the most proud ship of the Bulgarian Navy and representatives of the navies of over 50 countries honored its retirement in 1979.

Give other examples of battleships with proud history to honor them at least.

[Shirou]

Those things were indeed born out of necessity, because as we all know, WWII has shown that Aircraft Carriers are more important than battleships.

Here is another one, the Mogami Heavy Cruiser, also converted into a half assed carrier in 1944.

[tank50us]

(thinks for a moment) maybe we should host a contest of who can design, and model, the best Battlecarrier... I'll do it in the form of Naval Ops, where you have a set number of parts to choose from, but you have to be under the ships weight limit (determined by the Hull), points are awarded for the most efficient design, not by who's got the biggest guns.

any takers?

[CommanderJB]

On paper, or did you have a program in mind?
Edit, whoops, didn't read that right.

Edited by CommanderJB, 20 October 2008 - 01:15.

[General Kirkov]

3-4 Sunburn Missiles = 3000 dead sailors. Battleships are too slow too big to be an effective front line ship.

Thats why Cruisers and Frigates have become the warship of choice for navies without carriers and those with carriers have the Cruisers, Frigates and Destroyers all around them to prevent Anti-ship missiles to sink them. Whats the use of a Battleship that cant leave its protective net of picket ships to bombard the enemy?

[CommanderJB]

Your link is slightly out, but I agree, despite its age there are very few more effective anti-ship weapons than the P-270 Moskit. Battleships would however fit considerably more CIWS armament than any other ship thanks to their plentiful deck space and available power etc.; I don't think they'd be any more vulnerable to such a strike than anything save an AEGIS cruiser (and of course there'd be nothing stopping a modernised version from mounting AESA radars and VLS systems to approximate the performance of said cruiser because they're just so darned big). They're also not much slower; the Iowa-class were a special type known as 'fast battleships' because their ginormous turbines produced something like 36 knots, respectable even for a modern destroyer (though most of their support ships will still go c.10kt faster they're not the crawling leviathans most people think of). But of course it all comes down to the main armament, which is still useless for attacking enemy ships with no matter how well the ship can or can't defend itself against missiles or how fast it is.

Edited by CommanderJB, 20 October 2008 - 01:16.