paulobrito
Well-known member
Nothing special. After all, the WW2 I-400 series is way bigger.
Warship Appreciation Thread
- Thread starter Husky_Khan
- Start date
Nah. It's more that it's a new job for a US HK sub. Like I wouldn't be surprised if we sink it just because, then claim we didn't.
The Romeo's are just reskinned Type-XXI U-Boats, after all, so an I-400 class would be a decent contemporary comparison.
Not so much -- it's an old, noisy SSK that would be sunk with trivial ease in any conflict situation.
I wouldn't be so dismissive, having a mobile platform to launch their missiles still means that they are now within striking distance of a bunch of U.S. cities.
Is the sub dubious and outdated? Yep. Can U.S. Sonar easily track and shadow them? Yes. Do these missiles have dubious chances of successfully launching? Undoubtedly.
But even with all of the above they still have a chance, and we are now within range, the worst case before for us was a Missile Hitting Hawaii now they have access to all of the Western Continental United States and possibly the east coast as well if they get a place willing to allow them to resupply like Cuba or Venezuela.
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Yeah, which is why I think it'll sink in an 'accident'.
That is not accurate; the North Koreans have been able to reach the mainland United States with land-based ICBMs since the introduction of the Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15 in 2017, and also the Hwasong-17 in 2022. The -14's maximum range throw weight is on the marginal side making it more of a nominal capability, but the -15 and -17 can definitely do it.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Somebody wonted trucks on his holidays ?
Just a nice day at the beach.
Somebody wonted trucks on his holidays ?
What you don't see is the Boat Guys just outside of the shot grilling on the LCUs lol.
Doomsought
Well-known member
All empirical evidence suggests the opposite. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are prosperous cities, and the battleships won operation crossroads.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
WW2 battleships could take direct hits from modern missiles and keep on chugging as I understand it; meanwhile a single salvo from an Iowa class battleship would rip apart any modern warship.
They stopped being cost effective, but they didn’t stop being effective.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
I was commenting on the battleship’s durability and firepower. I am aware modern sensors and range are quite a bit superior to what was available in 1945.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
The passive defenses of the Iowa make for a really goddamn weird problem for modern ship-killing methods, because they are wildly impractical to sink unless you have a full-on Arsenal Ship laying around or get out the tactical nukes. The disabling is very much on the Iowas being a clusterfuck of modernizations not remotely built for the environment at the end of their life.
Solving the issue of shock propagation knocking out electronics, which is the one cause of what you're talking about, is just a matter of cross-referencing numbers with the supercarriers answer on a clean hull actually built for this, instead of a decades-old hull getting electronics bolted in wherever they happen to fit.
Granted, you're more likely to see a CB in the 25-40 thousand long ton displacement range than the 80k+ needed to be worth calling a capital ship next to the supercarriers, but it's still easy to relentlessly fuck with the current naval warfare paradigm this way. Hellishly expensive, but easy.
Yeah, but the devil is in the details. A battleship can survive these missiles, but chances are it will be blind and crippled, like any other ship hit by them.
Meanwhile battleship guns don't have the range to compete even with cold war missiles, so it's probably not gonna get that single salvo.
Cool, your BB is now blind, deaf and basically a giant sitting target due to being slower, have less range. And the captain and the bridge crew are now dead.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
The point is that the shock-propagation damage to electronics is solvable by actually building for it. Even if it's literally just sticking the equipment in spring-isolated blocks or some other similarly tonnage-bleeding brute-force approach.
Do you seriously think that a smaller ship with less engineering constraints on hull shaping is certain to be slower than the supercarriers?
They pour R&D money into a wide variety of hardware that this is true of. Because you can carry hundreds of times the ammo for the cargo space and cost of a typical cruise missile loadout with various forms of non-missile artillery.
And this isn't the case for the supercarriers? Every single thing we do to harden those can be done better on a ship that doesn't have a massive structural void and doesn't spend tonnage pushing the deck far above the waterline.
I'm not comparing the Iowas to the Nimitz or Gerald R Ford classes. I am saying that defensive design can in fact deal with cruise missiles, because the Iowas' issues almost all come from problems we've hammered at to try to avoid the same in the supercarriers. Getting electronics and crew to survive the shock propagation is an every-ship problem, not just a battleship problem, but a battleship gets devote much more tonnage to the answers.
Again, I think a new Large Cruiser class is much more likely in this niche than a revival of Battleships, but "lots of gun on a protection-prioritized hull" has very real value, mostly on the logistics.