Let’s say that air defense becomes so advanced that it can shoot down any anti-ship missiles. What then could new artillery capital ships designed and built using modern technologies be like? (Well, OBVIOUSLY not atomic, since any hit in the engine compartment will make such a ship unsuitable for its own crew)
I would really like to see new bluewater beasts with monstrous calibers, fully automated turrets, composite armor, guided shells (or railguns), etc.
Battleships will never be relevant again.
lol...anything that can spam nuke-tipped Tomahawks is relevant as frick.
>anything that can spam nuke-tipped missiles is relevant as frick.
so.... a hole in the ground.
>What if battleships become relevant again?
Then we would have gone back in time.
This take will never convince me anymore because I would never have fricking believed that 2022 was the year trench warfare came back after a godamn century obsolete
For all I know now, people are gonna start buzzing each other with Zeroes and Stutkas again and all our guns will have clips that go ping
Trench warfare was never obsolete. Trenches have and will continue to be dug because they are good. Did you learn nothing from the Iran-Iraq war? Supremacy of firepower + struggle to achieve mobility invariably = trench warfare.
now it is more like bunker warfare
>Trench warfare was never obsolete
it was never in vogue
>Trenches have and will continue to be dug because they are good
trenches have always been supplements to strategy, not the core
> Did you learn nothing from the Iran-Iraq war?
we learned that the elaborate trench networks of iraq could be dismantled with a decapitation strike to their command network
preventing the defenders from concentrating their defenses along any part of their trench network and allowing a bypass of all static defenses
>Supremacy of firepower + struggle to achieve mobility invariably = trench warfare.
stuff that never happened
>This take will never convince me anymore because I would never have fricking believed that 2022 was the year trench warfare came back after a godamn century obsolete
trench warfare never came back
a amjority of combat in ukraine occurred outside of trenches
Fortifications and earthworks never became obsolete. They simply became smaller and more temporary during the times in which armies were able to use maneuver or combined arms to bypass or destroy them. Every military teaches their troops how to dig foxholes and similar fortifications; a WWI-style trench complex is simply taking the process to an extreme. Whenever you have a situation where firepower is insufficient to defeat fortifications and enable maneuver, fortifications will grow in length, depth, and complexity. Look to Iran and Iraq for examples. Note the difference in the effectiveness of Iraq's fortifications against Iran, compared to their effectiveness against the US-led coalition.
>Let’s say that air defense becomes so advanced that it can shoot down any anti-ship missiles
When this happens, the air defence will be laser ciws. And lasers can also target shells very succesfully, its kinda the biggest appeal of lasers beside the cost.
So only theoretical good battleship in this scenario would be one with big big railguns, such a fast kinetic projectiles would be very difficult to actually destroy.
Long way there though.
>such a fast kinetic projectiles would be very difficult to actually destroy.
Nope. Even small amounts of surface damage to a kinetic projectile would throw it wildly off target, rendering it ineffective. If your lasers are good enough to make missiles obsolete, then guns are useless too.
>Nope. Even small amounts of surface damage to a kinetic projectile would throw it wildly off target, rendering it ineffective. If your lasers are good enough to make missiles obsolete, then guns are useless too
Press x to doubt.
Its one thing to destroy a tomahawk cruise missile or 155m shell filled with explosives with a laser, it completely another to mess with pure piece of tungsten slob moving at 3km/s towards you.
Sorry but the laserpower to frick with such a projectile is clearly on another level and i seriously doubt if such a laser would ever exist irl. And no, it wont go off course, we dont live in a cartoon.
Also, laser that blow up shells and missiles already exists - i.e. iron beam in israeliteland, yet guns are still very effective.
>it's completely another to mess with pure piece of tungsten slob moving at 3km/s towards you.
Lol that's fricking nothing, missiles have mogged guns in speed for a while now. Let me know when a railgun can reach escape velocity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
Sorry, but a battleship would never survive in a missile environment.
it's not about physically destroying the projectile, it's vaporizing just enough of it that the outgassing and disruption to the aerodynamics nudges it off course. Considering the ranges involved in this hypothetical engagement, even shifting a projectile's course by a fraction of a degree will reliably cause a miss.
The real killers in naval combat will remain submarines for the foreseeable future.
but naval guns will fire 100's of shells in a single engagement
Just like ships will volley hundreds of missiles in a single engagement? That's a point against guns, not for them - the counter to a laser CIWS is to saturate it with too many incoming all at once which guns are terrible at but missiles are fantastic for. Guns keep up a steady stream of fire which is the opposite of what you want, because then you run the risk of the CIWS reaching a cooling equilibrium with how quickly you can fire, and you never get to land a hit.
Even worse, missiles can seaskim which dramatically reduces the engagement envelope of a line of sight weapon like a laser, but guns have no choice but to follow a ballistic arc with a static velocity which makes any kind of projectile pure laser bait as they're vulnerable for far longer than a missile is.
People think lasers will make missiles obsolete and we'll go back to arty but it's the opposite. Nape of the earth missiles will hang on and artillery will go extinct.
We can only hope that the power requirements for laser defenses and railgun weapons necessitate larger surface combatants. Naval warfare has been irreparably harmed by the gay meta of launching missile salvos at each other. We need to retvrn.
>Naval warfare has been irreparably harmed by the gay meta of launching missile salvos at each other. We need to retvrn.
humans are autistic about finding ways to kill each other from as much of a distance as possible, i dont see anything BIG going back into warfare ever again, it will forever be a spam of rockets or drones.
its gay as frick but nothing we can do about it.
unless we figure out shields or something (Dune comes to mind, technology advances so much, it actually reverted back to hand to hand combat).
dune's solution to lasers is one of the dumbest bits of "forcing swordfights" worldbuilding i've ever seen
>Well, OBVIOUSLY not atomic
Also opposite of that - if you have lasers ciws and railguns you need shitload of powers
, and as missilies are no concern, obviously nuclear is the way to go.
If air defense can shoot down any and all anti-ship missiles, it can also shoot down any shells your BB tries sending downrange.
Welcome to the world of submarines and torpedo boats.
Also
>composite armor
Composite has minimum weight/bulk requirements that are impractical in naval engineering. You either get an armored citadel too small to protect most critical components of the ship, or you get a ship that will sink by itself.
Composite armor actually weighs less than homogenous steel and protects better with the same thickness.
It weighs less than THE EQUIVALENT of homogenous steel. It however unlike plain steel requires a set MINIMUM of weight and bulk investment to work at all. And that minimum already is impractically heavy and bulky for armoring ships.
Just make a bigger ship, lmao.
Doesn't work. The area you need to armor increases faster than the ability of the ship to carry that weight.
The perfect vessels in this dumbass scenario are torpedo boats, submarines and perhaps railgun-armed gunboats that engage in knife-fights (where your magic AD doesn't have the time to stop the shots) in which nobody can armor or protect themselves to any meaningful degree. So you want your gunboat to be as small, cheap and disposable as possible because any surface action is going to result in both sides tearing each other to shreds in short order.
>The area you need to armor increases faster than the ability of the ship to carry that weight
>composite armor doesn't work on ships because boats violate the square cube law
Like frick it does moron, armor area increases with the square of ship size, while buoyancy increases with its cube. WW2 battleships had armor belts half a meter thick. Lurk moar
just fill the ballast with helium to counteract it, ezpz
it's not weight that defines the ability of a ship to float, but density. you could float an entire mountain as long as you spread out the mass enough
composite armor is less dense than solid metal, meaning it is objectively better as an armoring scheme than solid metal where ships are concerned. not only can you match the armor protection with less weight, you can float identical weight ships using composite armor that EXCEED the protection of solid metal.
this is fricking middle school level physics
>battleship thread
>muh perfect AA
>muh no atomic power
>no mention of torpedos
>no mention of nuclear weapons
Absolutely shit tier bait thread.
What did the moron who made this think he was doing when he """"stealth"""" angled the turrets then added optical rangefinding(!) ears
also
>eurocopter tiger
>Eurocopter
Pretty sure that's meant to be an A 129 Mangusta, actually.
Now that I look at it again, I'm not sure it's meant to be either actually. I think they cribbed the nose and wienerpit from a ka-50 of all things, and the empennage is a generic eurocopter/airbus/aerospaciale fenestron.
Well, I take it back and instead would like to complain about how the two-level rear deck/helipads and the gun between them is a hilariously bad idea
You're blind. It's obviously just a regular eurocopter tiger.
>Let’s say that air defense becomes so advanced that it can shoot down any anti-ship missiles.
Torpedoes.
And before you say torpedo defenses will get too good: torpedoes that deploy decoys. Missiles that deploy decoys. Torpedoes and missiles launched in huge waves with dozens or even hundreds of decoys to overwhelm a target. This is the real answer and the real direction of development, you just don't want to hear it. Battleships weren't even relevant when they were new. How many times did they fight a near peer opponent? WW2 rocket assault ships showed that rocket turrets would have given a destroyer the same dumb firepower of a battleship but with the option of adding guidance later.
Immensely dumbass take. Protip: WWII was the final days of the battleships' age. Before that? The pre-dread and dreadnought battleship ruled the seas for half a century, to such a degree that having them was literally used as the measuring stick of wether any given non-landlocked country qualified as a serious power or not.
>WW2 rocket assault ships showed that rocket turrets would have given a destroyer the same dumb firepower of a battleship
For one salvo, if that.
Battleships absolutely dominated military budgets and doctrine for half a century, just as you said
But they never fricking mattered outside of the inconclusive skirmish at Jutland and the hilarious curb stomp at Tsushima (the latter of which could have involved literally any kid of ships or no ships at all because it was just Russians Gonna Russian 1,058th Edition)
Those air defenses in your scenario would also be good against shells.
>OBVIOUSLY not atomic, since any hit in the engine compartment will make such a ship unsuitable for its own crew
We used to have nuclear cruisers so clearly they don't care that much. Greater power generation is also pretty much the only reason you would ever build a large surface combatant, to power lasers, railguns, and more powerful radar.
Even then, I doubt we'll ever see them exceed 25k t, let alone reach the size of late battleships. It's still better to split your fleet firepower over as many ships as possible without losing capability.
>composite armor
Maybe to an extent, but the naval armor/protection meta is and has always been nearly completely different from ground vehicles.
>But they never fricking mattered
Fleet in being. There were also a decent amount of naval engagements in WWII that involved battleships where cruisers or destroyers would have been less effective.
Battleshits will never be relevant again.
Arsenal Ships might become a thing.
>Arsenal Ships
no mini drone arsenal ships will become a thing
They are already a thing but less stupid - submarines.
C-RAM can stop shells and guns have a far shorter range and less accuracy. However large vessels might make a comeback to deploy specialized missiles able to counter this.
Underwater drones can easily detect submarines nowadays, and once detected they're finished.
The only counter is your own drones. These can be deployed by small vessels able to move in and out of range, but the economics of it and larger weapons also calls for aircraft carriers, arsenal ships and motherships.
like
says
Already a thing and improved upon.
Ohio Class SSGNs Carry 154 Tomahawks. In addition too Torpedos and Harpoon ASHMs
>Well, OBVIOUSLY not atomic, since any hit in the engine compartment will make such a ship unsuitable for its own crew)
That's not stopping our carriers. But I don't expect you to know that.
They were a colossal waste of money that made the ~~*financiers*~~ who wrote the deficit spending for them and the ~~*manufacturers*~~ who built them.
>Let’s say that air defense becomes so advanced that it can shoot down any anti-ship missiles. What then could new artillery capital ships designed and built using modern technologies be like? (Well, OBVIOUSLY not atomic, since any hit in the engine compartment will make such a ship unsuitable for its own crew)
No. We'd just put torpedoes on large sea skimming missiles which would drop their torpedoes at the edge of AD range and then you'd die to torpedoes instead.
>not atomic
How the frick are railcannons going to be powered?
not him but nuc propulsion is a basically required for any railgun armed vessel, he's just being ignorant. The idea you can use nucs cus a reactor breach would make the vessel into a deathtrap is irrelevant. A hit to the engine room of any ships these days kills it for all practical purposes and the radiological contamination is already a factor on CVNs, SSNs and SSBNs. the Navy DID HAVE a class of nuclear powered heavy cruisers I wanna say in the 60s or 70s but decided it was overkill for the type basically there was nothing the cruisers needed that much juice for. Anything with an electrically energized projectile launcher will need that kind of power.
Even down to naming conventions,
SSBNs Carry the battleships tradition of being named after states, Attack subs the tradition of being named after Cities.
>air defense becomes so advanced it can shoot down any anti-ship missiles
So why wouldn't it be able to shoot down artillery shells? Keep in mind we're already working on artillery/mortar defense systems.
Speaking of Battleships
It's unfortunate but I doubt they ever will. The biggest class I think can make a retvrn is AA light cruisers IF we figure out railguns/coilguns soon. Having another layer of air defense suited for dealing with prolonged, cheap, long range interception missions is a capability I'm sure the navy is wishing for now.
What if guns stopped working and the Testudo became relevant again?
We need a new naval treaty outlawing missiles, return to all guns.
Battleships will be back after the Pulse Modulator is invented.
i love it when scifi settings name magical supertech after simple electronic components (a pulse modulator just smooths out transient on/off pulses in electrical power into a more constant output)
When we need something BB sized to carry our missiles.