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K. A. Pital wrote:I was thinking more in terms "Somalian warlords turn these weapons on neighboring African states". None of which really have a decent Navy to speak of.

As Elheru Aran mentioned above, there's a US Navy CVBG deployed in the area, along with other NATO assets, which would make that problematic for any Somali warlord.

Even if that wasn't an issue, the Somalis don't have the manpower, the infrastructure, or the experience to operate and maintain these monstrosities.

If Somalia or anyone one else you would call a warlord got a ship like this it would suffer a magazine explosion within days if not hours. Bagged power charges...someone will smoke in the magazine. Japanese ammo of all calibers was pretty poor on safety even by 1940 standards too.

However since battleships would be considered offensive weapons Japan would certainly scrap them all. One or two might get demiled into museums but that would be it.

Sea Skimmer wrote:If Somalia or anyone one else you would call a warlord got a ship like this it would suffer a magazine explosion within days if not hours. Bagged power charges...someone will smoke in the magazine. Japanese ammo of all calibers was pretty poor on safety even by 1940 standards too.

But that's the point. Then you'll have ripped-off guns flying in all directions and other Mad Max / Waterworld stuff. People would try to use shit and it will blow up. And then you'll have a massive graveyard of enormous ship husks rotting across the coastline. Ow yeah. Almost a Hollywood film in the making

Sea Skimmer wrote:If Somalia or anyone one else you would call a warlord got a ship like this it would suffer a magazine explosion within days if not hours. Bagged power charges...someone will smoke in the magazine. Japanese ammo of all calibers was pretty poor on safety even by 1940 standards too.

That makes me wonder.

Skimmer, how likely is it that a JDAM could penetrate to a battleship magazine?

And if you were going to get rid of a fleet of one thousand Yamatos without resorting to nukes, how would you do it?

Elheru Aran wrote:That makes me wonder.

Skimmer, how likely is it that a JDAM could penetrate to a battleship magazine?

Very easy. Although it'd be much easier to just board them and scuttle them.

And if you were going to get rid of a fleet of one thousand Yamatos without resorting to nukes, how would you do it?

One at a time at a scrapyard.

Purple wrote: Very easy. Although it'd be much easier to just board them and scuttle them.

No. Not going to work that way. All the bombs used for JDAM guidance, and indeed all the bombs the US military buys short of MOP all have casings that would probably break up trying to penetrate a steel deck that thick, that 4,500lb penetrator might have a shot but it certainly isn't designed for the job.

This would also not even remotely matter when the ship was hit ten or twenty times with 2,000lb GP bombs with non penetrating fuses and simply had the crap blown out of it. It'd breakup from the gross structural damage and flooding, forget about fighting the fires. Yamato is poorly protected against this kind of attack even as the final generation battleships go too, as she had only one armor deck and minimal deck armor on the ends. A single hit from the 30,000lb MOP would also work, said weapon might have trouble penetrating the deck too but it'd be more then powerful enough to rupture it by direct explosive blast. It might not sink from one, but it'd be utterly wrecked as a fighting unit.

Also modern precision weapons could do things battleships where predicated against not being possible, such as dropping the bomb in the water right alongside the hull on a long delay fuse, causing it to explode below keel level with results similar to a torpedo. People tried such attacks in WW2, but the very low accuracy made it undesirable (long delay fuse on GP bomb meant if you then got direct hits they'd breakup) and so it wasn't a big deal for the warships. Today we can be certain this will work.

Modern warheads designed to penetrate thick concrete will generally breakup against more then four or five inches of steel, because they have fairly high burster weights and long bodies to hold said burster. The nose is too blunt and uncapped, and the long body will flex and crack. But what do you want, they designed them for concrete which just doesn't get all that hard, but can be very deep,.

GP bombs aren't likely to penetrate armor decks thicker then 2in, but they can blow holes in thicker metal depending on how big they are and the actual angle of impact.

If anyone was really concerned about a ship like Yamato they'd just quickly pour some 1,000-2,000lb sized shaped charges and drop those or fit them to existing missiles, be much faster then making new armor penetrating bombs and nearly as effective. Battleships passive defenses aren't a joke, but it just doesn't mean so much once you get past five or six heavy bomb hits. In WW2 a 100 plane heavy bomber raid might not score such hits, today a flight of four fighters would expect to do better.

It should be telling that the last Battleships built in the world were built in 1945 (IIRC) and no country has had battleships in active duty since early 1990s (again IIRC) and it's not just due to nukes as it became quite quickly apparent that using tactical nukes carried too high of a risk of starting global nuclear war to be viable.

The last US battleship laid down to actually get completed was in 1942, for the UK 1941, for Japan it was 1940. Everyone else was prewar, the French for example only completely finished the Richelieu and Jean Bart well after the war, but they were laid down in 1935 and 1937.

A fighter bomber with a 2,000lb bomb load basically killed capital ships and most use of big guns on land. Guided missiles and bombs reduced the number needed most of an order of magnitude, but were hardly actually needed. The fighter bomber swarms had fairly low effect per plane, but because you could produce them for offense and defense, just as a battleship had integrated an earlier conception of what that meant, the shear number fielded more then made up for any difference.

Random ass fighter bomber iron bombing is still often more accurate then heavy artillery fire too. Its maligned sometimes in WW2 for not often killing tanks, but compared to other forms of fire support it was pretty good, and battleships are big targets. Since the battleship couldn't punch back to destroy the air bases or carriers it was just doomed in a very fundamental way.

Lord Revan wrote:It should be telling that the last Battleships built in the world were built in 1945 (IIRC) and no country has had battleships in active duty since early 1990s (again IIRC) and it's not just due to nukes as it became quite quickly apparent that using tactical nukes carried too high of a risk of starting global nuclear war to be viable.

HMS Vanguard was the last battleship ever launched, laid down in 1941, launched in 1944(the first RN vessel to be launched by then-Princess Elizabeth)and comissioned in 1946, decomissioned and scrapped in 1960.

While USS New Jersey was briefly comissioned and modernized during the Vietnam War, it wasn't until the early-1980s that the Navy modernized and recomissioned all four Iowa-class battleships, partly as a response to the Soviet Navy building the Kirov-class BCGN, and partly to satisfy the Reagan Administration's call for a 600-ship Navy.

All four were withdrawn from service following Desert Storm, though the explosion of the #2 turret aboard Iowa had pretty much decided their fate beforehand. All four are now museum ships, with Missouri permanently berthed at Pearl Harbor's Battleship Row, in proximity to the Arizona memorial.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:It should be telling that the last Battleships built in the world were built in 1945 (IIRC) and no country has had battleships in active duty since early 1990s (again IIRC) and it's not just due to nukes as it became quite quickly apparent that using tactical nukes carried too high of a risk of starting global nuclear war to be viable.

HMS Vanguard was the last battleship ever launched, laid down in 1941, launched in 1944(the first RN vessel to be launched by then-Princess Elizabeth)and comissioned in 1946, decomissioned and scrapped in 1960.

While USS New Jersey was briefly comissioned and modernized during the Vietnam War, it wasn't until the early-1980s that the Navy modernized and recomissioned all four Iowa-class battleships, partly as a response to the Soviet Navy building the Kirov-class BCGN, and partly to satisfy the Reagan Administration's call for a 600-ship Navy.

All four were withdrawn from service following Desert Storm, though the explosion of the #2 turret aboard Iowa had pretty much decided their fate beforehand. All four are now museum ships, with Missouri permanently berthed at Pearl Harbor's Battleship Row, in proximity to the Arizona memorial.

didn't know about the Vanguard thanks for the info, though it's really just trivia, my point being that no new battleship designs have been made since mid-40s and no battleship have been in active duty since Desert Storm.

What does "RAR" mean?

Ah, I think we've got bigger problems to worry about than a few anitque toy museum pieces suddenely showing up off the coast of Japan! We've now got proof of ALIENS!

ALIENS! WE'RE NOT ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE! AND THEY'RE TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPIOR TO US! "WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?! AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!"

JamesStaley wrote:ALIENS! WE'RE NOT ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE!

Well duh. I mean come on, do you know how big space is? The odds of us being alone are inconsequentially small.

AND THEY'RE TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPIOR TO US!

Well yea, kind of goes without saying that.

"WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?! AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!"

The same thing the natives always do when a technologically superior conquistador comes a knocking. Die.