What would be necessary conditions for battleships in the modern era?

BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
In the Gears of War franchise there were battleships, so I guess that counts?

They got utterly annihilated by the Hammer of Dawn though.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
A 16-inch naval gun does one thing, and does it well. Aircraft on the other hand can do many things.

If you want a scenario that makes a big mobile armoured artillary platform become the ruler of the seas again... how about this:

1) Serious shortage of hydrocarbon fuels, making the power-projection capability of aircraft a very limited resource.
2) The sun starts doing some fun electro-magnetic stuff, making modern-day electronics no longer reliable. Guided missiles suddenly aren't.
3) Something, I don't know what, to make torpedo-firing submarines no longer viable.

Then you can be back to the era of honking big guns lobbing shells, and people looking through binoculars at the splashes to adjust the range.
1) Ethanol can replace hydrocarbons. It's not as energy dense (27MJ/kg v. 40MJ/kg) so range, speed, and payload will suffer. Aircraft designs will be much more specialized and mostly land based because ethanol is miscible with water and saltwater tends to get into everything when you're at sea.

2) AA and ECM rendering anti-ship missiles a waste of resources would also do the trick. This would also make air attacks using unguided munitions an iffy proposition on a good day.

3) Countermeasures capable of reliably confusing a torpedo's guidance system and/or detonator would put things back to unguided ones with a contact detonator which have to run very shallow to hit the target and probably aren't wakeless unless they're battery powered.
 

Aaron Fox

Well-known member
1) Ethanol can replace hydrocarbons. It's not as energy dense (27MJ/kg v. 40MJ/kg) so range, speed, and payload will suffer. Aircraft designs will be much more specialized and mostly land based because ethanol is miscible with water and saltwater tends to get into everything when you're at sea.
Actually, with a fission reactor of sufficient size, you can literally synthesize any hydrocarbon.
2) AA and ECM rendering anti-ship missiles a waste of resources would also do the trick. This would also make air attacks using unguided munitions an iffy proposition on a good day.
Er, sensor tech is slowly getting to the point that ECM is... not that good unless you deny the spectrum to everyone. IR seekers have been a combination of UV/IR sensors since the Stinger came out back in the '80s.
3) Countermeasures capable of reliably confusing a torpedo's guidance system and/or detonator would put things back to unguided ones with a contact detonator which have to run very shallow to hit the target and probably aren't wakeless unless they're battery powered.
Er, that is a lot harder than it looks. That is unless you want to kill everything in the sea that is. Sonar systems are getting pretty good at sensing if there is a countermeasure out and about.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Due to the availability from sewage, methane powered engines are more likely than alcohol powered engines.

Alchohol as a fuel is literally only exists because corn farmers wanted to raise the price of corn.
For fixed instillations, sure ... but it's a gas with a really low boiling point at 1atm.

For something mobile that just won't work unless the expense of handling a cryogen is a non-issue (i.e.: a large rocket booster where you're already dealing with liquid oxygen) or your fuel tanks are pressurized to 316atm at room temperature.
 

Marduk

Well-known member
Moderator
Staff Member
Yeah, the hydrocarbon shortage is not gonna happen, there are many clever ways to synthesize a variety of nice hydrocarbon fuels if you can pay in energy and processing costs.
If major tradeoffs in capability are on the line, these costs would be undertaken.
Even if you have to make it out of bloody algae.
You can crack and polymerize hydrocarbons until you get the ones you want, if you can spare the energy, even if you start out with methane. This isn't even some bleeding edge tech, Germans even made aircraft fuel out of coal in freaking WW2, and that's just plain carbon.
Of course they didn't load it by the shovel into airplane fuel tanks, they processed it first.
The only problem with these ideas is that the fuel is nowhere near competitive with how cheap normal oil is. At least now. This can change one way or another.

Overal, aircraft or shipborne, missiles are missiles, they do the same thing. Often aircraft even carry variants of the same ones, all the aircraft does is move the missile closer to target before launch and give it more targeting information.

Battleships with plain ol' cannons just won't do. A heavy cannon shell is just a barely supersonic unguided projectile the size of a shortened Harpoon missile. Anything it can do, the right missile design can do it better, except for being cheap. But needing a whole battleship to carry around the launcher kinda ruins that too.
A more likely scenario would be nuclear powered neo-battleships packed with electrically powered weapons, who need to be so big due to carrying a decently sized nuclear power plant with them to power all the toys.
 
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Aaron Fox

Well-known member
Due to the availability from sewage, methane powered engines are more likely than alcohol powered engines.
You are more likely to see LNG/Propane engines than methane ones due to how hydrocarbons work. Although, to be honest, bio-diesel is just a tad less energetic than regular diesel.
Alchohol as a fuel is literally only exists because corn farmers wanted to raise the price of corn.
More like keep the price floor intact. The US is incredibly capable in the corn-growing department and -to be honest- most of it is kind of just sitting there due to how abundant the stuff is. Also, that is all that biofuels are in general.
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
Ultimately, the answer is armor. If a ship can stay in a slugging match for hours as in the heyday of battleships, then guns make far mroe sense than missiles.

Well, that was one part of it. Another was the low accuracy from manual targeting. Most of the big shells the battleships were lobbing at each other would land in the sea.
 

Marduk

Well-known member
Moderator
Staff Member
Ultimately, the answer is armor. If a ship can stay in a slugging match for hours as in the heyday of battleships, then guns make far mroe sense than missiles.
Active defenses are the new armor if anything. And those are improving rapidly, putting large cannons in the same category as supersonic missiles - counter artillery defenses are a thing now and they were field tested on some occasions, with targets much smaller than battleship sized shells.
There is a reason why all the cool kids on the block work are working on hypersonic missiles now.
Active defenses are also the only type of "armor" that can let a ship stay in a fight these days. Even if some magic armor material was invented that can stop a hypersonic missile from gutting a ship's insides, a proximity frag warhead or few would still do terrible damage to the ship's many weapon systems, antennas of all kinds, sensors, and the rest of superstructure, turning it into a mission kill, incapable of combat beyond firing random light to medium weapons at visual range, and awaiting at minimum few month long, 9 digit sum time in the shipyard to become fully functional again.
But if active defenses work, they usually work far enough for close to not be enough to disable the ship.

Now the only thing that is preventing the time of Kirov-on-steroids (and Kirov itself is already larger than most WW2 battleships in length while similar in width, just with less draft and tonnage due to not having heavy armor) style of battleship is lack of some kind of large, expensive system that is vital for that ship's combat capabilities but cannot be or is not worth scaling down to destroyer or cruiser size. This problem is already making everyone resign on cruisers, because what can be scaled down is and gets built in many frigate/destroyer hulls to not put all the very expensive eggs into one basket.
 

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