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2015-08-30 Home Front: WoT

Is It Time to Bring Back the Battleships?

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Posted by Steve White 2015-08-30 00:00|| || Front Page|| [1 views ] Top

#1 And systems redundancies would come from..?

Posted by Blossom Unains5562 2015-08-30 00:47|| 2015-08-30 00:47|| Front Page Top

#2 ...Sadly, the battlewagons are gone. Iowa, New Jersey, and Missouri are all museums and beyond bringing back as warships. Wisconsin was held in semi-restorable status for some years, but IIRC that was changed a couple years ago and she is now a museum herself at Norfolk. There are no spares, no support facilities, and most importantly, there is no money for a crew that big.

As far as designing a new 'heavy combatant'...Dear Lord, think about how badly the current Naval-Industrial Complex would frack that up. Look at the horror show design of the LCS - I mean, frigate - became. Imagine what they'd do to a 'heavy combatant'. (Actually, you don't have to imagine, just look at the USS Zumwalt.)We'd have to design a new missile - Tomahawk and Harpoon are both, bluntly, obsolete, so there's a couple of hundreds of billions of dollars there. And finally, any idea of a heavy gun is going to have to stay buried - the USN can't design a proper 5' gun any more, much less anything bigger, and we no longer have the industrial base to do so anyways. Railguns might - MIGHT - be a game changer, but it's way too early to tell.

Keep in mind too that big is nice - lots of space to put in new stuff later and absorb hits if it comes to that - but it's really not necessary, at least not for us. Everything we need to kill other ships we can squeeze into a Burke class DDG because American technology. The Soviets needed a Kirov sized hull because that's what was needed to carry their tech, along with two separate propulsion systems because they couldn't build one big enough and well enough to trust - an American Kirov, with the same punch, would have been notably smaller.

Mike

Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2015-08-30 06:48|| 2015-08-30 06:48|| Front Page Top

#3 At this point it might be relevant to note that we're comparing current inventory to WW2 hulls. Our current destroyers are size of WW2 cruisers, our current cruisers are the size of early WW2 battleships. So if we let designs for new battleships, they'd be how big? Guam, or merely Saipan?

Posted by ed in texas 2015-08-30 14:54|| 2015-08-30 14:54|| Front Page Top

#4 Why not take an old carrier hull, and rebuild that to fill with nothing but missiles and rail guns? Lots of room for equipment, lots of space to absorb damage and place armor, and without the need to crew and maintain manned aircraft, the crew requirements could be massively reduced.

Posted by OldSpook 2015-08-30 15:25|| 2015-08-30 15:25|| Front Page Top

#5 Heck, OS, there would even be enough rooms for sensitivity training classrooms, LGBTQ safe spaces, and other necessities for today's navy.

Posted by Rambler in Virginia 2015-08-30 16:35|| 2015-08-30 16:35|| Front Page Top

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