At that point, there is an argument to just use what you have anyway, no need for building a whole ship dedicated to it.
The Future of Current Battleships
- Thread starter Bacle
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Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
Cant be worse than spending the GDP of a country on a new destroyer with a proprietary gun that doesn't work, then crashing it.
D
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At that point, there is an argument to just use what you have anyway, no need for building a whole ship dedicated to it.
See! Army can fight a naval battle!
Francis Urquhart
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This is absolutely right. There's no need to reconstruct an existing ship when we can do this. That's a HIMARS by the way, the Marine Corps version of the Army MLRS. The interesting thing about both HIMARS and MLRS is that they can fire the ATACMS missile that is guided and has a range out to 100 km. That would be a zero-cost modification; it would use pre-existing equipment and any ship with a flight deck - meaning any surface combatant or amphibious warfare ship. If one wanted to spend money, we could buy into the US Army Long Range Precision Fires (LRPF) program that is intended to produce an ATACMS/M270 replacement. That will have a range out to 500 km. It will have either a 500 pound unitary warhead or submunitions. There are no plans to put a nuclear warhead on it. Nobody has suggested that, not at all. The idea has never even crossed people's minds. Absolutely never ever discussed. Even considering the possibility has never even been imagined.At that point, there is an argument to just use what you have anyway, no need for building a whole ship dedicated to it.
Which brings us back to the main point, there is no capability that can be provided by a reconstructed battleship that is not already duplicated by existing systems. So why waste the money and manpower?
D
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National Guard has HIMARS too... Bloody Marines.
@Francis Urquhart that would negatively impact flight operations during a landing, so, actually, I would say the easiest way to do this would be to replace the gun positions on the Zummycubes with Mk.41 cells and stuff them full of guided rockets.... This has actually been suggested and I think is the best use for those hulls.
@Francis Urquhart that would negatively impact flight operations during a landing, so, actually, I would say the easiest way to do this would be to replace the gun positions on the Zummycubes with Mk.41 cells and stuff them full of guided rockets.... This has actually been suggested and I think is the best use for those hulls.
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
Actually there are those who think that running a DDG-1000 aground at high speed is probably the most cost-effective things we can do with it.
In fairness, the guns on DDG-1000 do work (well, the 155mm AGS does, the smaller ones not so much), its the shells that are problematic. They've been cancelled due to excess cost and inadequate reliability and that leaves the AGS no more effective than the 5 inch Mk.45 Mod.4. It's the hull design, machinery layout, battle management system and sensor fits that don't work. Plus they look like something the French design office in the 1880s might produce.
The current proposal is to convert DDG-1000 from shore bombardment ships (which was a non-role if ever I have heard one) to surface combatants by removing the guns and replacing them with VLS silos. This essentially means sawing the forward section of the ship off and replacing it. That would also allow us to give them a new bow. May happen, but the funding is so tight right now that its low on the priority list. FWIW, my proposal was to give them to the Chinese and hope they would copy them. That would cripple their naval growth for at least a decade.
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
HIMARS is good because it is light and mobile. The air operating cycle on an amphib is boom-or-bust - there's a frantic effort to get the helos carrying the Marines on their way, then nothing until the surviving helos return an hour or so later. So, we could drive the HIMARS onto the deck and use them in between. Coincidentally, that's when we want to use them so it sort of fits. It's a kludge but there's no reason why we can't do it.
The plans to rebuild DDG-1000s into surface combatants have been tentatively approved. The problem again is that by the time we strip the existing systems and add additional VLS, we haven't got much of the original structure left. The proposal I saw was to simply remove the bow forward of the bridge and graft on a new one. Using modern construction methods we could built the bow separately and then cut off the old one and weld the replacement on during a refit.
D
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If we do that we should just redesignate them BBG and rename them.. There, we’ve recreated a battleship force.
Francis Urquhart
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Shhhhh - somebody might hear you. 
. It has also been suggested that they be reclassified as cruisers.
There is a big US Navy cruiser project in the pipeline. At the moment the DDG-1000s are being used to test systems for that.
. It has also been suggested that they be reclassified as cruisers.There is a big US Navy cruiser project in the pipeline. At the moment the DDG-1000s are being used to test systems for that.
D
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Bah, the battleship people can deal with it. I just really like the idea of having a battleship force which can fire as many rockets as a Soviet Front could in 1945. Except they're all 80+ nm range guided cluster munitions. That should let the Marines land on a beach again... And of course we can allow them to be target designated by other naval vessels and aircraft to have an anti-ship capability.
Francis Urquhart
Well-known member
Is it too much to ask that we mount rail guns and freakin' lasers on at least one ship? I mean, nuclear reactors ought to make them more practical, right?
Nuclear-powered surface combatants is a thread all to its self. It's a very complex issue. However rail guns and lasers? Sure we can. In fact, remember I mentioned a large cruiser coming down the pike? It's (vary unimaginatively) called the Large Surface Combatant and will have both rail guns and lasers as part of its armament. Very unlikely to be nuclear powered but going to six or eight LM2500G +4 (circa 30MW each) will possibly do as a power plant. I'm pushing the six LM6000 option (40MW each) myself. My argument is that new technology weaponry always drinks more power than planned. They're coming but they'll be on new ships not warmed over has beens from the age of the dinosaurs.
Lanmandragon
Well-known member
The name should be changed to the "suck it China". I'd laugh forever
Gods no, retrofitting the old battleships is a horrible idea.
You would be massively better off straight up building new battleships from scratch if you actually wanted their capabilities than you would be trying to retrofit the old tubs.
What would be amusing would be to see a plan to strip out virtually the entire air compliment from a Ford, throw in an extra nuclear reactor or two, and turn all of that space into a weapons platform. It wouldn't be worth the money, but it would at least be amusing. Especially if you fit the thing with a number of appropriately sized railguns with the reactors to power them.
You would be massively better off straight up building new battleships from scratch if you actually wanted their capabilities than you would be trying to retrofit the old tubs.
What would be amusing would be to see a plan to strip out virtually the entire air compliment from a Ford, throw in an extra nuclear reactor or two, and turn all of that space into a weapons platform. It wouldn't be worth the money, but it would at least be amusing. Especially if you fit the thing with a number of appropriately sized railguns with the reactors to power them.
That is the Iowa herself.
When they were reactivated for the last time, the Navy had to pull back long-retired veterans to man numerous systems because no one had the training for them anymore. That's even more true today, because with the last of the Kitty Hawk class retired a decade ago, there are zero ships in the United States Navy that use any kind of steam propulsion other than nuclear, and the nuclear sets run very, very different dynamics than conventionally fired boilers.
Lanmandragon
Well-known member
So your saying the movie battleship is based in reality? That's pretty freaking sweet.
In the sense that they had to rely on bringing back veterans to teach otherwise forgotten skillsets and techniques to younger sailors assigned to the vintage battlewagons? That absolutely happened, just not on movie time scale.
But in the 1980s you had battleship vets teaching boiler technicians who were trained on post-WWII steam plants the ins and outs of the older-generation steam plants; today, boiler technicians don't even exist anymore, that rating was disestablished entirely.
Edit: In short, the last reactivation of the Iowas was basically running on fumes: the last of the stockpiled ammunition and heavily cannibalized spare parts, the last veterans who still had the old skills, etc. The amount of investment required to redevelop the skills would be far, far greater now than it was then.
Edit More: Ironically, the mockbuster knockoff of "Battleship" had a vastly more realistic and technically accurate plot. . .
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Point of order. The Zumwalts look like this:
That's much closer to a surfaced GUPPY submarine, though a whole lot uglier and less smelly:
You're making me want to watch this now, and I hate you for it.
Isn't that ultimately the only real use for them? Technology testbeds?Shhhhh - somebody might hear you.
There is a big US Navy cruiser project in the pipeline. At the moment the DDG-1000s are being used to test systems for that.