So I was thinking about a modern Battleship design.

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candle86

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So after having been a recent love affair with battleships, seriously I've watched at least 40 documentaries on them in the last month, and read wikipeida on a great many, Ive started to think about their purpose in a more modern era and I think I have it.


We know the old Battleships where removed because airplanes had a longer range and could also sink a battleship, which at the time had very limited range for the main armament. But today's navies are very different than 1945.

First off most ships afloat besides the Aircraft carrier are 100% unarmored these days, and rely on interception to stop incoming missiles and aircraft, while also using missiles for offensive purposes. Modern Anti-Ship missiles are also built to get through about 6in of modern ship based armor, because that is what Carriers usually carry.

Now we have new advancements as well in shell technology, namely smart shells that we are deploying to the new zumwalt destroyers, and these got me thinking, if their effective range is over 70 miles, because they are guided, why not build 16in guided smart shells, they can't be intercepted because they move much faster than a missile, and they can easily tear apart unarmored ships as well as the lightly armored carriers, and a modern battle group would be unprepared for this type of foe.

A battleship could in return also survive quite a few anti ship missiles, because its more heavily armored than the missile can penetrate, the Iowa's for example would have laughed at an Exocet missile, it wouldn't have penetrated the armored belt.

Now the bigger weakness is air cover, but in much the same vein as a carrier group, a battleship would be escorted as well, and might even be within a carrier task force, giving the task force the ability to take out an enemy carrier from range for alot cheaper than missiles. I could see a modern battleship using 21st century technology being a true menace on the sea's again, and because of modern tech, we wouldn't need 9 guns, 6 would do just fine so the space saved could still be loaded with cruise missiles, or medium range ballistic missiles.

What are yalls thoughts?
 
candle86 said:
So after having been a recent love affair with battleships, seriously I've watched at least 40 documentaries on them in the last month, and read wikipeida on a great many, Ive started to think about their purpose in a more modern era and I think I have it.


We know the old Battleships where removed because airplanes had a longer range and could also sink a battleship, which at the time had very limited range for the main armament. But today's navies are very different than 1945.

First off most ships afloat besides the Aircraft carrier are 100% unarmored these days, and rely on interception to stop incoming missiles and aircraft, while also using missiles for offensive purposes. Modern Anti-Ship missiles are also built to get through about 6in of modern ship based armor, because that is what Carriers usually carry.

Now we have new advancements as well in shell technology, namely smart shells that we are deploying to the new zumwalt destroyers, and these got me thinking, if their effective range is over 70 miles, because they are guided, why not build 16in guided smart shells, they can't be intercepted because they move much faster than a missile, and they can easily tear apart unarmored ships as well as the lightly armored carriers, and a modern battle group would be unprepared for this type of foe.

A battleship could in return also survive quite a few anti ship missiles, because its more heavily armored than the missile can penetrate, the Iowa's for example would have laughed at an Exocet missile, it wouldn't have penetrated the armored belt.

Now the bigger weakness is air cover, but in much the same vein as a carrier group, a battleship would be escorted as well, and might even be within a carrier task force, giving the task force the ability to take out an enemy carrier from range for alot cheaper than missiles. I could see a modern battleship using 21st century technology being a true menace on the sea's again, and because of modern tech, we wouldn't need 9 guns, 6 would do just fine so the space saved could still be loaded with cruise missiles, or medium range ballistic missiles.

What are yalls thoughts?
Click to expand...

The main rational for battleships was to have large platforms to have the biggest guns and best armor to survive massed combat, and then provides large caliber gun support for land battles. That is not really where modern naval combat is anymore. The biggest rationale against battleships is probably that smaller ships can do the essential duties (win open-sea battles, and help with land bombardment), and those smaller ships are being developed with stealth capabilities to avoid being targeted.

Guided missiles helped extend the useful life of battleships, but they can launch from other ships, including carriers and submarines. With modern warfare, stealth and high-speed, high damage surprise attacks are the biggest threat (e.g. stealth planes and modern submarines with modern torpedoes and missiles), not massed guns.

I'm ignoring rail guns on ships, because I don't quite believe it, and I'm not quite sure battleship-sized ships would be needed for that.
 
Battleships really can't be cost justified any longer. For the cost you could build a couple of destroyers. To support a battleship's guns, a ship has to be both very wide and very heavy, otherwise they won't be stable enough to fire them. You just can't build the ship smaller without the necessity of mounting smaller guns. So would the guns be justified? There isn't that much they can do that cannot be done by less costly, and more flexible, other options.
 
GoodGame said:
The main rational for battleships was to have large platforms to have the biggest guns and best armor to survive massed combat, and then provides large caliber gun support for land battles. That is not really where modern naval combat is anymore. The biggest rationale against battleships is probably that smaller ships can do the essential duties (win open-sea battles, and help with land bombardment), and those smaller ships are being developed with stealth capabilities to avoid being targeted.

Guided missiles helped extend the useful life of battleships, but they can launch from other ships, including carriers and submarines. With modern warfare, stealth and high-speed, high damage surprise attacks are the biggest threat (e.g. stealth planes and modern submarines with modern torpedoes and missiles), not massed guns.

I'm ignoring rail guns on ships, because I don't quite believe it, and I'm not quite sure battleship-sized ships would be needed for that.
Click to expand...

You could make a battleship quite stealthy as well, the using the basic idea of the Zumwalt class, you could then increase gun caliber still retractable and reduce missile load out. The biggest problem with current tech, is to sink any modern battlegroup, you would need to fill the sky with missiles to really have a chance at doing damage, the automated defenses are simply numerous enough, while shells can't be shot down unlike a missile. We havn't been in a naval war since 1944, but I think the next time we are in one, we will find it a fast stalemate because neither side has the means to actully cause a serious treat to a battlegroup.
 
Cutlass said:
Battleships really can't be cost justified any longer.
Click to expand...

This has been my understanding. Yet gunshells are so much less expensive than missiles and uninterceptible within their admittedly shorter ranges. Further, the USMC has been much worried over the lack of shore-bombardment capability of modern missile boats.
 
Glassfan said:
This has been my understanding. Yet gunshells are so much less expensive than missiles and uninterceptible within their admittedly shorter ranges. Further, the USMC has been much worried over the lack of shore-bombardment capability of modern missile boats.
Click to expand...


Admittedly gunfire is something that the Marines would want. But at the price of a battleship, it's too much. Individual shells may be cheap. But if you're only doing fire support once every 10 or 20 years, then the Navy needs the money elsewhere.
 
Cutlass said:
Admittedly gunfire is something that the Marines would want. But at the price of a battleship, it's too much. Individual shells may be cheap. But if you're only doing fire support once every 10 or 20 years, then the Navy needs the money elsewhere.
Click to expand...

By that logic all the carriers need to be held in reserve also.
 
and so could a modern designed battleship, it can be armored alot better than a carrier, have modern fire control, guided missles, 6 16in guns in 2 triple turrents firing guided shells that can easily go 70-80 miles if not further, the 5in gun on the Zumwalt can lob its shells 67 miles, and the bigger gun also has the better range, so they become lethal carrier killers, and with Modern Automation like with modern 5in guns, you wouldn't need a gun crew so you just lost about 500 people right their, you would obviously make it nuclear powered, so again you lost another 100-150 men no longer needed to maintain the boilers and a smaller crew can maintain the reactors. Id say you could build a modern Battleship the size of an Iowa Class but only need about 350-400 sailors top.
 
That could never be cost justified. And it would never be a threat to a carrier. If you need bombardment that bad, you could put a bunch of 155mm guns on a destroyer hull. It would get the job done for a fraction of the cost.
 
No carrier group worth its money would let a battleship group get within 100 km. Big guns don't help if nothing is in range to shoot at.

So far the race of armor against warheads has always been won by the warhead. If any nation would try to field a new battleship, how long do you think it would take for the other nations to build new waheads for their anti-ship missiles?
 
The proper enemy of an aircraft carrier would be a nuclear attack sub. A modern BGN would be for other purposes. In the role of heavy, accurate bombardment, the battleship would be unsurpassed.

The final Iowa Class modifications, just in time for Desert Storm, was the addition of Tomahawk cruise missiles (which incidentally can sink carriers from beyond a thousand nautical miles away).


Tomahawk Armored Box Launcher unit, this one aboard New Jersey.


Wisconsin fires a Tomahawk missile

Besides, they just LOOK badass:




BB61 USS Iowa broadside.


USS Missouri BB63.


IJN Yamato.
 
I used to be like the OP (although I had no idea that 40+ documentaries on them had even been made!). When I was 13 or so I was crazy about battleships. Iowas, Fuso/Ises, King George Vs... I loved most of them.

It's only now that I'm relatively dispassionate that I can see things a bit more clearly. Battleships became obsolete, more or less, because other ships could do the same job more cheaply and effectively. While the vulnerability of battleships to air power has often been exaggerated, they were still not really worth the huge expense anymore. They came back in part because the '80s saw the government throwing endless amounts of money at the military. One battleship costs as much as several smaller vessels, and several vessels can be in several different places at once.

As for a modern battleship, I've read of proposals for new designs with railguns and/or rocket-assisted guided shells with a huge range. They're interesting, but will almost certainly never go anywhere. Naval aircraft are continuously improving, and the addition of large amounts of UCAVs to the fleet will make it possible to conduct air attacks with virtually no risk of human loss for the attacker. The Navy is very interested in the new experimental railguns, but only wants to mount them on destroyers and other smallish ships. There's little reason to mount them on battleships, since a few destroyers could probably do the same job and you're not putting all your assets in one ship that might get sunk.
 
The steel ships came about from the need of using ships to siege/attack coastal positions of other great powers/euro powers, as in the Crimean war and the first euro ironclad-like ships (floating guns, basically). The development of missiles during ww2 seems to have spelled the death of the capital ship, along with the later manufacture of nuclear missiles, cause now you would not send a fleet as a combined force against another nuclear power, for obvious reason.

Destroyers and smaller ships are used a lot. For example afaik the Aegean fleet is quite large, and probably no battleship still is used there, with the old battleships being used as floating museums now and they won't be adapted to see service again.
A modern war between reasonable and sort of equal or similar powers, will probably (?) be missile-centered, at least until the missiles tend to run out. But if it comes to that, well, it pretty much won't matter by then..
 
Early 'Battleships' were developed in response to the introduction of new technology that allowed explosive shells to be used instead of inert cannon balls. This made wooden armour finally obsolete. (Wood had already reached the limits of its application since there is a practical limit to the size of vessel that can be constructed from wood without exceeding the mechanical limits of that material - that limit corresponds to classes of ships not much larger than those used as 1st rates in the Napoleonic era, which were themselves incredibly expensive.)

The pre-dreadnought/dreadnought/battleship era that resulted was effectively a continuous race to build bigger, better armed, faster and more heavily armoured vessels as construction techniques and gunnery improved at a furious rate.

This era came to an end when weaponry improved to the point that it would be impossible to defend against the weapons merely via armour - which happened basically when planes became capable of dropping tons of bombs out of the sky and torpedos became truly effective. The list of WWII battleships battered to death from the air is a long one.

The cold war era was categorised in naval terms by the US adoption of the Supercarrier as capital vessel. The Russians, in turn, being largely uninterested in power projection that is reliant on carriers (their expected battlefield was their own back-yard in Europe or possibly China) focussed on developing a navy loaded with huge numbers of missiles - to overload the defences of the target fleet.

Current naval doctrine is not actually based around the expectation of major naval conflicts in most cases (we've had an interesting conversation about this before). Most navies are for fisheries protection, enabling limited landings against terrorist targets or taking action against pirates.

If I were trying to build a navy for future large-scale confrontations I would probably do what the Chinese and Indians are doing - developing stealthy, long-range and intelligent missiles. These could be built in large numbers and carried easily on small vessels. No need for battleships.
 
Battleship was like a knight well armored hard to stop and powerful to be a threat against anything that came into their range just like a knight charge would be devastating in right circumstance.

As long as their main threat was other similar size or larger battleships they was useful because a large battleship would have little to fear, and for enemies be a very large risk to attack and even a victory against it could cost more for the enemies.

However at ww2 times both submarines and aircraft had become dangerous even for a large battleship but its hard to say if they had gone obsolete at this time because battleship themself had improved alot.

While aircraft had become much deadlier against ships in general ships also became much more deadlier to air, for example of all aircrafts during ww2 that came in range of US navy aa guns 36% of them was destroyed and battleships carried some of the most powerful aa batteries of the navy + being very hard to sink with good damage control however this may not be true for older outdated battleships.

However aircrafts are much cheaper then big ship and with an carrier can attack targets far away from any ship gun reach which does mean that the carrier can entirely ignore the powerful artillery a battleship.

Later on weapons have gotten so powerful that its better to try to avoid them because a hit means death for most ships and a smal ship loss is much less than a large ship one.

However if defense would beat the weapon battleships may very well return.

One idea would be some kind of forcefield often seen in sci fi which also include large powerful ships.
If the forcefield could be made more powerful the large the ship and don't get weak by multiple attacks then it could be much better to invest in a large nearly indestructible ship instead of many smal ships which easly can be destroyed.

Survivability for the cost is the most important thing, weapons come second.

The real winner after ww2 have been the submarine not carriers or any surface ship in my opinion.
 
Phrossack said:
...As for a modern battleship, I've read of proposals for new designs with railguns and/or rocket-assisted guided shells with a huge range...The Navy is very interested in the new experimental railguns, but only wants to mount them on destroyers and other smallish ships. There's little reason to mount them on battleships, since a few destroyers could probably do the same job and you're not putting all your assets in one ship that might get sunk.
Click to expand...

I too had envisioned the proposed railguns being placed upon battleships, but next year, the first experimental railguns are being tested on a JHSV (joint high-speed vessel). That's only 1,500+ tons, 100+ meters in length. So, small ships can serve.

BTW: Today's US destroyers are as long as WWII battleships. :eek:
 
Zkribbler said:
BTW: Today's US destroyers are as long as WWII battleships. :eek:
Click to expand...


Only some of them. :p American destroyers now are over 500 feet long. Iowa is 887 feet. Yamato and Bismark were longer ships as well. But the battleships before them were built to the Washington Naval Treaties limits, and so were smaller. South Dakota-class, 680 feet. North Carolina-class, 728 feet. One big difference, all the American ships were 108 feet wide. (The locks of the Panama Canal were 109 feet wide) A Spruance destroyer. 529 feet long, 55 wide. WWI battleships wee smaller. A Zumwalt destroyer is 600 feet long and 80 wide.

Spoiler :
 
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