The Navy Thread

We gots guns, tanks and airplanes, so why not a ship thread? Civilian and commercial ships are fine too for this thread.

For starters lets talk about battleships. For example I didn\'t know these existed.

Question: What is the oldest naval ship that still sees regular use?

I wanna say USS Constitution ("Old Ironsides"). She is seaworthy and travels at least once a year under her own power for ceremonial purposes.

I thought it was that cutesy little Russian recovery ship

@Satsuma-class battleships: And we accomplished nothing!

Seriously, what a let-down for those ships. Didn't do squat except get used for target practice.

Sadly a lot of ships and ship classes end up with that fate. Or scrapped.

Le Garcon, Tom

I was looking for Kommuna, a Russian mini-submarine tender launched in 1915. I suppose I should have been clearer. Constitution is a heritage piece with zero military value.

edited 25th Jan '15 6:32:55 PM by Achaemenid

Honestly, scrapping is the closest thing to a "natural death" a ship can ask for. Sure beats sinking, or being used as target practice like the Satsuma. I see the ship that did her in was the Nagato, which was freaking nuked. Twice.

I dunno, being sunk and turned into an artificial reef is a pretty cool way to go. Good for fishies and you can turn it into a nice memorial spot and all.

That's an entirely different sort of natural death. That's more like, I dunno, donating your body to science.

Better death as a target than a scrapyard. At least there's something left beside razor blades when it's all said and done.

RE: the Satsumas; actually like a certain other Japanese class (HI SORYU), the two ships have very little in common. Aki had steam turbines making her slightly more than one knot faster with nearly six thousand more horsepower, was ten feet longer, 800 tons heavier, one inch more armor on the turrets, and had a 6" tertiary battery rather than 4.7" as well as improved anti-torpedoboat battery with four more 12pdrs than Satsuma.

Of course, Aki was laid down in March of 1906. HMS Dreadnaught completed in December of that year, and Aki did not complete due to various snafuings with her engines until 1911. She was painfully obsolete by her completion date.

edited 25th Jan '15 10:37:52 PM by Night

Is there any way for battleships to return to modern navies in revamped form, in the same way frigates, destroyers, and cruisers moved over the course of the Cold War from purely gun/artillery-based armaments to guided missile-based systems? I don't know about you guys, but if land-based artillery is still practical as weapons, why not warship-based 8-inch cannons?

There are two practical considerations.

First, the weapons of decision. During World War II there was a distinct shift in battles being decided by guns and armor and towards sensors and weapons-sensor integration. The classic examples can be found in the battles of Surigao Strait and Vella Gulf, where US ships equipped with SG surface-search radar could deal death from the safety of the darkness against Japanese opponents. However, other examples litter the war; Scharnhorst was lost at North Cape because a lucky hit from a British cruiser wiped out her radar, rendering the ship helpless against a trio of British cruisers that otherwise would have posed no threat and ultimately causing her to blunder into a short-range gunfight with HMS Duke of York that Scharnhorst couldn't have hoped to win. USS South Dakota was rendered deaf, dumb, and blind by Japanese gunfire knocking out her radar and internal communications at Second Guadalacanal despite the fact her armor citadel was never pierced. Hiei was lost at First Guadalcanal largely because of damage she took in a short-range duel with heavy cruiser USS San Francisco, a fight she technically won and despite the fact San Francisco did not penetrate Hiei's belt armor. Bismarck lost her directors during her last battle, and though she fought on with guns in local control they were ineffective as such. The Battle of ONS.5 ends with a case study on the advantages of those who have radar over those who do not; over forty German submarines became the prey rather than the hunters when the battle entered a large fog bank, and several were lost as Royal Navy surface ships escorting the convoy attacked them out of the fog. Radar fire-control consistently allowed US ships to score first-round hits throughout the Pacific campaign, where the Japanese had to perform the old drill of bracket-to-straddle; fire short, fire long, adjust to hit target. Allied shipboard radio direction-finding gear let them vector escorting aircraft onto talkative U-boats during convoy battles.

By the end of the Second World War, the lesson was clear: the new electronic sensors gave a massive advantage over those who didn't have them. Yet these sensors could not be armored. At the same time, wartime experience taught the lesson that armor could not protect everything that made a ship an effective fighting unit. Fire-control gear, internal and external communications, and even just the fact that a ship does not fight well with a large fire on deck no matter the status of its combat systems all suggested that armor was not an effective answer to the challenges of a modern combat environment. Combat doctrine by the early 1950s when most ships still depended on guns recognized this, and emphasized opening fire at maximum range with rounds set to airburst over the target ship in hopes of knocking out his radars before he could knock out yours. In the modern missile era, the scope of the battlefield is so large and the ranges at which engagements are fought are so long that a ship with a damaged radar or no radar is essentially a punching bag; enemies will attack from beyond its ability to detect them using means that it cannot hope to accurately target in defense.

Second, reach: battleship gunfire can only project power for about twenty miles. Aircraft and cruise missiles can reach hundreds or thousands. Shore bombardment is a very specialized role in the modern era, and one that, given the reach of modern landing ships with hovercraft and helicopters, may not even be necessary. In a real sense the need to come over a defended beach may not exist anymore. Even if it does, the range and power of modern shipboard guns, with their much improved accuracy and guided munitions, allows them to accomplish things with their smaller guns that battleships could not have hoped to accomplish in the 1940s. If one can put a 5" shell through the gunport of a bunker, you do not need to batter the reinforced concrete outside of it with 16" shells.

edited 26th Jan '15 10:19:46 AM by Night

What if we put like railguns and things on them?

Because if any significant hit is probably going to knock out your most important combat systems through shock damage, why build one large, heavily defended ship? You can build a half-dozen smaller ones that together have just as much firepower and active defenses...and if one of them takes a bad hit, the others can still keep fighting. Defense for modern warships is active (missiles/guns to shoot down attacking missiles and aircraft) or passive dispersal rather than passive soaking-the-hits.

Battleships were big because they needed very large guns and very heavy armor to deal with similar ships. If you take away the value of the armor, you no longer need the very large weapons systems to penetrate it. (Of course, you don't need them anyways since modern shoulder-fired ATGMs have the penetration values to defeat battleship armor; designing a cruise missile HEAT warhead to do it and slapping it on an existing system would be trivial.) If you can get away with smaller guns, you can also get away with smaller ships in general, saving you money and letting you build more of them.

For any theoretical railgun battleship, you could build the equivalent tonnage in railgun-armed Zumwalts and probably get more out of them.

edited 26th Jan '15 10:31:49 AM by Night

But what if we also gave it CIWS for days?

I want my giant dreadnoughts again, I don't care if they're impractical. They're just so damn cool.

Don't think that'd stop the rail gun from another, smaller, cheaper, ship. Or a torpedo from a submarine.

edited 26th Jan '15 10:42:13 AM by Parable

^ If that's the case, then Zerg Rush is all that's needed to win. He who has more missiles and boats wins.

Except historically that's never been true. Worse, the bigger ships can do things the smaller ones cannot do or do as well or as long. For example, aircraft carriers are massive force multipliers. A Nimitz battlegroup has far more firepower and versatility than an equal number of Arleigh Burke destroyers working as a single fleet. An Iowa-class battleship post-1980s refit has more firepower and versatility than anything that's not a carrier, battleship or (missile-toting like the Kirov) battlecruiser.

A modern cruiser can cover many roles that destroyers, frigates and missile boats can only dream of doing. A Ticonderoga can kill ships, swat aircraft out of the sky, defeat incoming ballistic missiles, and support a landing ALL IN THE SAME MISSION. Arleigh Burkes while attempted to be designed with that philosophy in mind can't do the same quality as a Ticonderoga. The battlecruiser Kirov can do everything save launch a fighter wing.

So what you're saying is we can make big dreadnoughts of old a thing again but only if we make them a multirole type thing instead of just a big ass gun platform?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/BattleshipCraft https://itunes.apple.com/app/id936718726

Ahem!

Except there's been some changes to that philosophy. Armor was well-realized as necessary again by the 1980s. There are a lot of ships who went through World War Two who had they not been armored (or armored as well as they were) would be at the bottom of the sea often with all hands lost. The battleship West Virginia took enough torpedoes (7!) to make the attack on the Yamato look like child's play. And it wasn't permanently blown to Hell either!

Then you had the other end of the war with Baka bombs and kamikazes. Ships with better protection like cruisers and carriers survived hits that destroyers and destroyer escorts did not. And these were effectively some of the first anti-ship missiles.

The sensors part is true except for the cases of torpedo attack. Long Lance torpedo equipped Japanese ships routinely outranged their US counterparts and did so often undetected in their launches. Of course post-war, sensor systems were built sensitive enough to find even that.

Armament is something of an oddity. The big guns did lack in range compared to say a P-500 Bazalt (NATO Reporting Name: SS-N-12 "Sandbox") but they were effectively unstoppable once fired. The shells were too thick and heavy to be deflected by CIWS fire of almost any kind especially the AP shit. Better yet, they had longevity of fire. While theoretically the Macross Missile Massacre of a modern missile ship can match the More Dakka of a WW 2 battleship in rate of fire, that battleship can do so for a Hell of a lot longer. Very useful in ground support actions or certain types of fleet defense.

Modern railguns make bigger guns more feasible at standoff ranges. We can also accomplish this in part through stuff like the Advanced Gun System or dusting off the old MCLWG program and modernizing it. Plus guns are a hell of a lot cheaper than missiles so for the same cost you can have a ton more ammo available.

More or less. But the modern BB would be more akin to cruisers than the USS Nevada.

@ Major Tom: Bull.

The carriers are big because they need to big for aircraft; and aircraft bring something unique to the table. That's valid. The rest of your post is garbage.

Anything a Tico can do, a Burke can do; they don't carry quite as many weapons, but that's literally the only difference in capability between a Flight Two of both classes. (A Flight One Burke is massively more capable than a Flight One Tico; VLS vs. dual-arm launchers.)

There is a minimum size to make an effective multi-role warship. It probably sits at about the level of the old O.H. Perry FFGs. (SAM system, ASROC, tail, two helos; basically everything you need.) Beyond that point the only real question is endurance and weapons load. And there is definitely a point of diminishing returns that the Kirovs managed to land beyond.

The '80s refit Iowas were awful compromise ships with not even the slightest air-defense or ASW capability, totally dependent on their escorts for any kind of protection. Their only purpose was to scare people who didn't understand how modern naval combat worked; Russian politicians.

The argument about protection ignores a few very important facts: first, modern ships have torpedo-defense systems that are actually amazing, to say nothing of the existence of active torpedo defenses since around 2000. Second, modern torpedoes can't be armored against anyways (they detonate under your keel and use the hydrodynamic forces to snap you in half). Third, you're confusing raw size when it came to Fritz-X/Ohka hits with armor having helped. (It didn't; both weapons were more than powerful enough to penetrate any existing armor. Ask Roma how much her deck helped against the Fritz-X hit she took.)

edited 26th Jan '15 6:12:37 PM by Night

Go take your logic somewhere else, I want my giant impractical super dreadnoughts.

Such as? The way the Russians have rigged up their Kirovs there's almost nothing in our arsenal that can kill it. About the only thing that can is if a Los Angeles or Seawolf gets in real close and slams some torpedoes into it. (And they'll have to evade the Russian submarine fleet and surface escorts before they can do that.)

My ass. How many of these climactic naval battles involving missile sluggers have there been again? None? Everything mentioned about modern vessels and their capabilities is a strictly on paper affair, they've yet to see any real sort of combat conditions. The main evidence we have in the missile era is Latakia in 1973 and it was more proof of the need NOT to be reliant on missiles than it was a triumph of missile tech or not needing armor. (Also a proof against straight numbers.)