Also, the B-52 used to be able to engage other aircraft (two confirmed kills), but it was a capability removed later on to save on weight.
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
I think it means that their ships can sortie in and out of port, but not make the trip around the peninsula to get from one side to the other.
For similar reasons on a slightly different scale, the US Navy traditionally operates as two independent forces because it's simply too much trouble to make a habit of deploying forces back and forth from the Atlantic to the Pacific on a regular basis.
That is correct, they just don't have enough oil to sail around the peninsula.
If battleships had not been rendered obselete by carriers, would they be used similarly to cruisers, or more in the role that carriers have now if sticking to the back and providing support.
I know they have an impressive amount of secondary guns, some of them even having whole cruisers worth of arment as an afterthought, and there armour was incredibly thick, but were they actualy intended to brawl? Or sit in thr back and lob shells with all that being because they could....
They were intended to get in slugging matches, but that was sort of before the advent of modern weaponry. Our ability to cause damage has far outstripped our ability to absorb damage, so it's considered not particularly worthwhile to armor ships the way battleships were armored.
Destroyers have filled pretty much all of the niches that battleships used to fill. With 90+ VLS cells the Arleigh Burke has more punch than a battleship in many ways, and can also be used for other critical tasks like air defense and anti-sub warfare. Add to that carrier air wings being the Navy's main anti-surface weapon and you can see why battleships fell out of style.
If battleships came back I think they'd look a lot like the new Zumwalt in that they'd be high-end surface combatants with a secondary land attack mission. With railguns coming onto the scene the idea of a gun-armed battleship is being considered again, though even then you probably wouldn't see the massive quantity of guns like on an Iowa, rather a few big guns and lots and lots of VLS cells. There probably wouldn't be a huge amount of armor either, maybe some light armor around critical parts but it would probably have extensive anti-air and anti-sub capabilities instead.
I'm envisioning something around the size of an Iowa but a lot lighter, with one or two big railguns up front and then hundreds of VLS cells crammed everywhere else.
They should have sent a poet.
I was wondering about how they would have worked in WWII in particular if they had been able to work, which would have been the slugging match still?
But yea, I know about how lethality has outstriped armour by a long ways, which means that really most ships have transitioned to the "floating artilary platform" role, because you just cant get close enough to ever use guns in the first place.
It’s hard to say. They were certainly designed for slugging matches, but by the end of WW 2 the very concept of a slugging match was totally outdated. In WW 2 they were often used for air defense and shore bombardment, especially in the Pacific.
Battleships could have continued to slug it out potentially, if aircraft carriers and submarines were never invented. Those two things were what really ended the age of the battleship. Even then I think those kinds of tactics would have only lasted until missiles became prevalent, at which point missile destroyers become the most economical surface combatants.
They should have sent a poet.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
The Arsenal Ship concept was supposedly going to fit a similar bill. Though the original concept didn't have access to upcoming rail gun tech. Instead they would have been a very large warship hull crammed with missiles.
edited 12th Mar '18 4:23:09 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Battleships did slug it out a few times during WWII, usually when carriers were tasked elsewhere, so pretty much never as a front burner engagement (with the possible exception of the Royal Navy's hasty interception of the Bismark, and even that wasn't a traditional force-on-force battle because the Germans never did manage to build a substantial blue water navy beyond their sub force.
That said, most of the battleship-on-battleship engagements in WWII were relatively small, the biggest one I think being the Battle of Surigao Strait, where the unfortunate Admiral Nishimura's Southern Force sail right into an American line of six battleships, four heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, 28 destroyers, 39 patrol boats, and I imagine a kitchen sink. Nishimura had two battleships and assorted escorts, and to make it fair on the Americans, he approached through a narrow strait which obliged his force to sail into a designated kill zone where they were subjected to considerable torpedo attacks even before they entered the broadsides of the patiently waiting American B Bs.
Well that can't be helped by the fact that even as late as 1942, most navies had battleship counts in the single digits compared to the double digits of WW 1. Japan had 8, the US had like 9 (counting the half dozenish that were destroyed/damaged at Pearl Harbor), the Soviets had like 3, the UK had something like 8 or 9, might've been 10, the French had like 5, Italy had like 7 more like 3 or 4 post-Taranto, and Germany didn't have any technically speaking, their battleships being more akin to overarmed cruisers and battlecruisers. Nobody had more than a dozenish at any one point.
Of course, this was the result of decades of scrapping, combat losses and disarmament treaties during and following World War One.
Imca:
Had the "battleship theory" been the correct one, likely you would have had evolution of battleships from there. They would still "slug it out" with other battleships, but instead of crossing-the-T and engaging in broadsides they would have been a bit of a dodge-and-weave, shoot-down-stuff-as-it-comes-in fight once missiles and point defenses came into being.
Likely they would resemble 1980s refit Iowas and some of the Cold War ships both NATO and Soviet containing a mix of guns and missiles. Armor would likely be a factor since armor does help in a nuclear war provided the blast is not underwater, plus the need to engage other ships would result in survivability upgrades as new types of armor (likely composites to help defeat shaped charge warheads) emerged. Thus a post-WW 2 "battleship" would likely be an armored (though not as thick) warship heavily compartmentalized, brimming with guns and missiles of various types and calibers (likely nothing heavier than 203mm eventually, ammo capacity is better than lobbing 1000 kg shells in a missile fight) with significant point defense capabilities. In addition they would likely end up doctrinally like the Kirov or the 1980s Iowas, in that they are simply lead ships of their own forces. They would rarely if ever operate on their own either singly or in groups of other battleships without screening vessels.
A Century Later And The Case Of The Missing Collier USS Cyclops Still Remains Unsolved.
(Not your typical Fox News article, text below.)
But the vessel – reported to be the Navy’s biggest and fastest fuel ship at the time – and the 309 men onboard it never pulled into the Chesapeake Bay on March 13, 1918, and its whereabouts to this day remain unknown.
“In terms of loss of life and size of ship, it’s probably the last great mystery left unresolved,” James Delgado, an underwater explorer, told the Baltimore Sun this week as recent discoveries of historical shipwrecks are renewing hopes amongst the scientific community of finally finding the Cyclops.
The 540-foot long and 65-foot wide ship, outfitted with 50-caliber machine guns to help transport doctors and supplies to American Expeditionary Forces in France during The Great War, was last seen in Barbados on March 4, 1918.
Built in Philadelphia eight years earlier, the USS Cyclops was capable of transporting 12,500 tons of coal and could lift two tons of it in single buckets along cables that ran along the ship, leading newspapers to call it a “floating coal mine,” according to the Baltimore Sun.
But on its final journey, the Cyclops was loaded up with 10,000 tons of manganese ore – a denser and heavier cargo – and stopped at the Caribbean island for nine days to resupply before vanishing into the horizon.
Those back in the U.S. began to take notice as day after day passed without any signs of the ship making its way to Maryland.
"COLLIER OVERDUE A MONTH," blared a headline in the New York Times on April 15, 1918, next to a list of the hundreds of passengers on board.
"Numerous ships sailed to locate the collier as she was thought to have been sunk by a German submarine," the Naval History and Heritage Command says on its website. "Her wreck has never been found, and the cause of her loss remains unknown."
Two months after the ship failed to reach Baltimore, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who then was an Assistant Navy Secretary, announced the Cyclops and all of its crew were presumed lost at sea, resulting in what remains the largest loss of life in Navy history unrelated to combat.
Nothing from the ship has been found. No wreckage, oil slicks or debris. Not even a distress call. And speculation has raged throughout history, leading some to claim wild theories involving the Bermuda Triangle, giant sea creatures and mutinies.
"One magazine, Literary Digest, speculated that a giant octopus rose from the sea, entwined the ship with its tentacles and dragged it to the bottom," the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command said. "Another theory was that the ship suddenly turned turtle in a freak storm, trapping all hands inside."
Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels at the time added that "there has been no more baffling mystery in the annals of the Navy than the disappearance last March of the U.S.S. Cyclops.”
“There has not been a trace of the vessel, and long-continued and vigilant search of the entire region proved utterly futile," the Baltimore Sun quoted him as saying.
But recent deep sea discoveries of American ships, such as the USS Lexington — lost at the Battle of Coral Sea in 1942 and found last week — and the USS Ward, found in the Philippines in December, both by an expedition crew led by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen, are giving explorers hope the Cyclops could be next.
“The short list keeps getting shorter these days as technology steps in,” Delgado told the Baltimore Sun. “Things can be found. It’s just a question of time and money.”
Marvin Barrash, who has spent more than a decade researching the Cyclops, believes it could be sitting in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, the Puerto Rico Trench, which extends more than 27,000 feet below the surface. He is now working with Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., to build the ship’s first monument.
“As a Navy veteran, I feel I have a duty to honor the crew members on the USS Cyclops who never returned home to Baltimore, and the families they left behind,” Harris said in a statement.
Barrash, a great nephew of one of the firemen on the ship, told the Baltimore Sun that he just wants the ship “to be found.
“I want the 309 to be at rest, as well as the families,” he said. “It’s something everybody needs: some resolution.”
Given some recent events, Fox News got a good bit of snark for reporting on a ship going missing a 100 years ago as the lead story on their site.
I don't see what newsworthy items in American politics Faux News could possibly be reporting on. Everything's been going swimmingly since November 2016.
/s
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.
I mean, surely Obama or Clinton have done something heinous they could write about, like letting someone hold a door open for them or using the wrong kind of mustard on their sandwich. ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Maybe they can run an article about the time Obama destroyed the country by wearing a tan suit. So unpresidential!
Remember that Chinese "railgun"? Apparently the Chinese say it's real.
Yeah, I'm not buying it. It reeks of fake and propaganda all over it.
Doesn't mean rail-gun though, get your act together journalism.
Otherwise the Ford Class rail-guns airplanes down the deck.... which while awsome to word it like that is misleading.
Could be something as simple as a magnetically lobbed mortar.
edited 20th Mar '18 7:01:02 PM by Imca
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Yeah from a Chinese propaganda arm no less. I am not buying it either.
Who watches the watchmen?
Internet: "So which ship was responsible for this?!" Japan: "¿Por que no los dos?"
The law in the night
The Ford Class is a vessel that has a railgun that shoot planes that drop bombs!
Inter arma enim silent leges
Tom: Well, souls of Gerbils and maybe the hearts of a few orphans.
edited 28th Feb '18 9:05:10 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?