Warships

[barkhauer]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... mahawk.jpg

Edit: that image was absurdly huge when viewed without scaling, so I've just linked it instead.

Wisconsin firing a Tomahawk at a target in Iraq.

In response to a previous point, Iowas both are and aren't as vulnerable to missile attack as other ships. For one thing, BBs when they were still around operated as the core of a battle group, much as nuclear carriers do; thus, they would always be well escorted by ships with air and missile defenses. In addition, the warhead on a missile is actally smaller than you would think. ASMs derive most of their killing power from kinetic energy used to deliver an explosive charge inside an unarmored target. You could pump Exocets into an Iowa all day without ever coming close to sinking it.

What you can do, however, is achieve a "mission kill." The electronics, fire control radars, electrical wiring, etc, on a battleship are just as vulnerable as on any other warship. A single missile can knock out the ability of the battleship to achieve its tasks of launching offensive weaponry. But sink the ship itself? I don't think so.

[stephen]

What if it gets hit by a russian supersonic P-800 Oniks or P-700 Granit anti-ship missile. The P-700 has a 750kg warhead

[kkania]

There are some great points being brought up here. Aside from coastal support and, later on, being a missile platform, the Iowa class is a great force projection tool, which is perhaps hard to simulate in SR. Since they are in reserve currently, this role has been taken over by carriers, but should a more naval-centric conflict arise in the future... who knows. The Russian Kirov class went through long perturbations too, and currently I think only one of them is in service, which I think reflects the crisis Russia is in - you can't project force if you're country can barely support it's military. Yet the Russians still keep most of their ships in reserve, because they now that single Kirov bobbing around on the coast of, say, Georgia, could influence diplomacy a lot.

I'm not sure how force projection works in SR - amassing forces on a border makes the neighbour antsy, but I doubt military units have any force/respect values attached. Despite this, the Iowas would still be valid in-game, just like they were in Korea and Vietnam. Considering we can be war mongers in SR, we'll probably have more conflicts than in real life, and keeping the Iowas busy won't be a problem.

[barkhauer]

What if it gets hit by a russian supersonic P-800 Oniks or P-700 Granit anti-ship missile. The P-700 has a 750kg warhead

With a ring of escorts and much heavier CIWS and countermeasures than most surface combatants, their odds of actually being hit by a single missile are rather low.

Now if, for the sake of argument, they were actually hit by these missiles, they would fare much better than any of the ships you have listed above. All-steel construction takes missile hits much better than modern mixed construction (which often involves aluminum, which has a frightening tendency to burn and/or shatter like glass when struck by even small warheads.) Add in the ship's sheer size, large crew for damage control capbiblities, and heavy armor protection around the critical vitals (such as magazines and propulsion spaces, where pumping is operated from...) no, you're not sinking an Iowa with a single missile, unless it's nuclear. As I stated previously, the ship's electronics would be as vulnerable as anyone else's to topside damage, but that sort of damage wouldn't threaten watertight integrity anyway.

Besides, you're committing the same fallacy yet again. You started a thread about Cold War hardware, in a subforum about a Cold War game, then proceeded to post a poll about naval hardware, a great deal of which is post-Cold War. If you want a modern ship thread and poll instead, just post one. You're critically weakening your own argument by conflicting yourself here.

[stephen]

Japanese sunk battleships at Pearl Harbor with ww2 bombs, and if battleships are so good as you are saying, why arent they used this days?

[barkhauer]

Japanese sunk battleships at Pearl Harbor with ww2 bombs, and if battleships are so good as you are saying, why arent they used this days?

First, make up your mind. Is the topic modern day, the Cold War, World War II when Pearl Harbor happened, or World War I, when most of the battleships present at Pearl Harbor were built?

[stephen]

You said an Iowa could not be sunk by a single missile so I made a comparation with ww2 era, a P-800 can use top attack strike and hit the deck not the belt of the ship. And the warhead of a P-800 that penetrated the deck and blows inside the ship, gets ripped in two pieces.
No ship is undestructible, no mater how armored or well defended it is.

And battleships were replaced by Aircraft Carriers, that carry more firepower than any other warship

[barkhauer]

You said an Iowa could not be sunk by a single missile so I made a comparation with ww2 era, a P-800 can use top attack strike and hit the deck not the belt of the ship. And the warhead of a P-800 that penetrated the deck and blows inside the ship, gets ripped in two pieces.
No ship is undestructible, no mater how armored or well defended it is.

Which. Era. Are. We. Talking. About.

[Chesehead]

The Iowas were built after pearl harbor, so they were desighned to deal with armor piercing weapons that were plunging. Thus, any top down strike would have to go through a couple layers of deck armor that way.

In fact, they were almost specifically brought back in the 80's to deal with the Kirov's. They were fitted with an 8 in sabot for the 16 in that can shred any armor today.

[Slyguy3129]

The "Battleships" we lost in Pearl Harbor are better called Dreadnaughts, liken to the WW1 name BBs earned because most if not all of them were WW1 era ships.

We had already began building a new BB fleet before Japan even attack, so aside from the loss of human life destroying those BBs in Pearl did nothing but weaken our fleet for a very short period of time.

As far as the 750kg missle, if it even were to hit an Iowa 750kg was give or take the same size warhead as a WW2 torpedo, and most BBs in WW2 could swallow anywhere between 6-8 torps before they got into serious trouble. And again that is assuming that the missle can penetrate the screen anti missle frigate and destroyers that will obviously be very much awake once the missle is launched, much less getting any weapons platform on Earth close enough to a CVTF to be able to launch it.

I'm also curious as to which era you are using. The Iowa class was te end all, be all of BBs which is way its class is the last class of BBs. Would love to see one still using it's main guns to level small cities.

[czert]

In fact, iowas will be very resistand for today missiles. Why ? becaus thier armor, it is much thiner than second best armored ship ( I think 2x-3x bigger). And modern missiles are designed to beat modern "light armored" ships, not 70 years old behemots.

[Lea]

I see no sense in this dispute. You're comparing ships of different roles with incomprehensible tactical situation. The battleship will not work at sea without escort, and Kirov class battlecruiser will attack squadron or single battleship by means missile salvo.

[LiKaapstad]

I see no sense in this dispute. You're comparing ships of different roles with incomprehensible tactical situation. The battleship will not work at sea without escort, and Kirov class battlecruiser will attack squadron or single battleship by means missile salvo.

I agree this dispute is quite futile...

[Chesehead]

I see no sense in this dispute. You're comparing ships of different roles with incomprehensible tactical situation. The battleship will not work at sea without escort, and Kirov class battlecruiser will attack squadron or single battleship by means missile salvo.

But the Iowa's were refurbished with that scenario in mind. Dealing with the massive soviet fleet coming down on them.

[barkhauer]

I see no sense in this dispute. You're comparing ships of different roles with incomprehensible tactical situation. The battleship will not work at sea without escort, and Kirov class battlecruiser will attack squadron or single battleship by means missile salvo.

I agree this dispute is quite futile...

I'd just settle for us to be talking about the same friggin time frame. The argument seems to be that it's ok to have a modern day poll mislabeled as a Cold War poll because ww2 aircraft in massive waves managed to sink unprepared, anchored WWI battleships. It's no wonder the arguments are so disjointed, we don't even know what the friggin topic really is.