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Post by Airy W on Dec 9, 2016 13:10:14 GMT -6
I just had a battle where my 4000 ton cruiser and an enemy 5300 ton cruiser were both sunk. Much to my surprise, this counted as an enemy victory because the enemy had inflicted more damage. Shouldn't the bigger ship be worth more points?
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Post by Airy W on Dec 9, 2016 11:13:58 GMT -6
Inspired by a tiny battleship in the best designs thread... I have decided to play a RtW game with a ludicrous design restriction. You are coming pretty close but I feel that you need smaller main guns to really get into the spirit of the thing!
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Post by Airy W on Dec 9, 2016 10:21:33 GMT -6
When will they? When they can provide more to a naval battle than an aircraft carrier of equal cost. CIWS and anti-aircraft systems would have to be good enough to make a warship of significant size nearly immune to missiles and aircraft while simultaneously not making a ship immune to gunfire. You would need to surround the ships with ASW escorts to protect the battlecruiser from torpedoes. And I think technology evolving in this way is indeed plausible. One of these future battleships or battlecruisers would probably be armed with long range high elevation guns with guided projectiles capable of hitting targets beyond the horizon spotted by a scout of some sort. Said ship could either attack other surface ships at large ranges or be used as artillery in support of land forces. Said ship might be fitted with armor, the point of the armor being to withstand gun-based projectiles fired from other ships, and not missiles, bombs, or torpedoes. Anti-air defenses wouldn't need to be perfect for battleships to possibly be effective. Long range kinetic fire improving could also accomplish this. Lets suppose hypothetically that 25 years from now the various navies of the world are equipping their destroyers with railguns that can bombard an area three hundred miles away. The accuracy rate is going to be horrible (given the two minute travel time) but quantity is possible. Any navy could afford 1000 projectile for the cost of a single "carrier killer" supersonic missile. These railguns wouldn't render carriers useless but they would create an inventive to build armored warships.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 8, 2016 17:57:57 GMT -6
There are some supersonic tactical anti-ship missiles currently in production. Yes but what about the targetting? The technology to get going at Mach 6 has been around for 5 decades now.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 8, 2016 17:49:33 GMT -6
And AA, especially early war AA, proved to be altogether ineffective no matter what navy. By the time most AA guns could hit attacking aircraft they'd already released their payload and it mattered little if the aircraft were shot down or not. The lesson of WWII is that no AA system can compare to a CAP that can hit attacking aircraft long before they can even see their targets. Late war american AA shot down quite a few kamikazes. Sure I would rather have a CAP but this goes back to the whole "one side had a lot more carrier aviation" thing. The Americans were developing in two directions at once, good AA and huge numbers of CAP fighters. Just because the AA is the second line of defense doesn't mean it isn't useful.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 8, 2016 2:36:19 GMT -6
Going by that logic, the armor on a tank is useless. Tanks need optics on the outside. Tanks need modern electronics on the outside. Tanks have external treads.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 8, 2016 2:11:35 GMT -6
Hypersonic missiles traveling at Mach 6-7 will easily penetrate the armor due to size and speed. These haven't actually been built yet. There are a lot of technological challenges there; it's no small task hitting a maneuvering target hundreds of miles away. And you are now adding in the additional design requirement of a downward hit instead of coming in from the horizontal direction. AFAIK that would completely negate the entire reason d'etre of these designs which is to keep low in the attack to stay undetected. If they come in high then a laser or rail gun could disable them from far away. Supersonic missiles with shaped charge warheads will penetrate the armored citadel. Adding another design requirement onto a weapon designed to hit a soft target. Shaped charges mean you have less mass for your payload. So now you have to bloat the missile to a bigger size to keep it as effective. This could actually be a reason for battleships to become viable again, if supersonic missiles were effective against carriers but weren't large enough to mission kill battleships. Confined spaces such as turrets and the conning tower are very susceptible to streaming gases bouncing around inside. Modern electronics and machinery means that battleships could be a lot less vulnerable in things like the conning tower. The conning tower could be eliminated entirely and replaced with very hardened and replaceable antennas. The whole exhaust superstructure can be ditched if you have a nuclear engine. Heck if you want to be really forward thinking, you could even remove the entire crew quarters and replace them with a helipad and constantly rotate most of the crew in from off ship from a secondary vessel. This could result in a battleship smaller then some of the battlecruisers these days. The Mediterranean, the hunt for Bismarck, the sinking of POW and Repulse....they were just too significant scenarios that proved that fact. The Bismarck was just horrible design work and had an AA defense that disabled itself. And while it was disabled by a biplane, the British needed to have a modern battleship around to turn that disabling into a kill. It is not an example of what you claimed about airpower always being able to finish off a wounded ship. In the Mediterranean Battleships DID attack the enemy surface fleet. And this despite the fact that Italian AA was very meh. A lot of things went wrong with the Prince of Wales and Repulse. The reason I focused on the Pacific war is that is the only theater where carriers did completely run the show. The Japanese and Americans had built up fleets around the assumption that carriers would play a central role. The British, Italians and Germans had not.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 7, 2016 20:13:13 GMT -6
If we define a battleship as a "Large ship protected by armor and which main weapon system is a big bore gun", no. I mean, battleships historical armor was (in the best cases) able to defend only very critical components of the ship, leaving most of the rest pretty much unprotected. By WW2 it was pretty plain and obvious to see that such a formula wouldn't work anymore - if your ship is soft killed by mounting damage on the unprotected areas, sure it won't be sunk immediately, but it can't fight back at all, and sooner or later the fliers will come and finish it off. I think this is a skewed perception. There were several factors that exaggerated the power of air as the war continued: 1) For more then half of the conflict the Americans outnumbered the Japanese 4-1 or more in carrier air number advantage. In those conditions the Americans are going to be able to muster enough aircraft to launch another attack if a battleship is wounded. In a more even fight, the Americans might not have had the luxury of doing that. 2) The side with that air advantage had the faster battleships and better radar. This made it more practical for the Americans to minimize surface contact to play their aviation advantage instead of throwing the dice on more surface engagements. 3) The side with the air advantage also had better submarines. This was an additional reason for them to play to an indirect style of fighting. 4) The side on the receiving end of carrier air power had inferior AA guns. American destroyers had AA radar and proximity fuses. Japanese battleships did not. To sum all of this up, sure Japanese ships were unable to survive a full carrier task force but that's kinda an extreme case of overwhelming attack and third rate defenses.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 7, 2016 7:21:56 GMT -6
So overall I guess my opinion is that if the technological development trends go in a certain way, which the chance for is significant, we could see a return to battleships. And if they go other ways I think the battleship will be dead for awhile. It's very hard to make predictions, especially about the future.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 7, 2016 6:22:15 GMT -6
Large, precision anti-ship ballistic missiles will soon be a thing as well if they are not already The technological challenges of those are not insignificant. I wouldn't say it's a certainty that offensive capability will outpace countermeasures in this regards.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 6, 2016 8:28:46 GMT -6
That sounds like the sort of self depreciating thing you would say if you were a multi-camera sitcom character. Are you a retiree who lives with his smart alec son? Or a wise old black man?
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Post by Airy W on Dec 6, 2016 8:18:54 GMT -6
I have looked back and I missed this: he was just trying to be helpful to someone who stated he didn't have access to his normal sources. My bad, I thought he was directing that comment towards me. Note: previous post deleted because it was purely a product of my confusion.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 5, 2016 8:39:03 GMT -6
As to the German helis and autogyro's they had quite a lot in service Name a few of the battles they played a role in to help us see what a lot of service means.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 5, 2016 1:36:11 GMT -6
There, now which plane would have won a fly off? The one with the best and smartest pilot. This is all well and good but my argument was not nearly that broad. I was just holding out the engine as an example of the Germans rushing a prototype into service when it had a major flaw, the short service life. From this I conclude that the German military during WWII was overly optimistic about the ability to put high tech equipment into service. So when he says the Germans were confident about helicopters I say that doesn't count for a lot. The German military consistently overestimated the ability of German engineers during WWII.
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Post by Airy W on Dec 4, 2016 19:42:33 GMT -6
The way I read it in a book I have back in Ottawa (not where I'm living at the time.) The Navy used them quite a lot for reconissance, and the army wanted them for supply transport but the Luftwaffe cockblocked them. And the light choppers had been in development since the 20s and where quite reliable. I do acknowledge that a lot of the German wunderwaffe were crap, I certainly believe that they wanted them but the fact that light helicopter experiments are reliable does not mean that helicopter supply is technologically viable. The US had already achieved such tasks and it took another 15 years or so to produce large transport helicopters for general service in the role you are talking about. The vehicles that served in Korea were much more limited then that. but I would debate your statement with the jets. Yes they broke down a lot but most were out of service due to fuel shortages. It is impossible to judge the true effectiveness of equipment when at any one time less than 100 can fly due to lack of fuel. That is irrelevant. The fact that they spent more time waiting around before they had a chance to break down doesn't affect their service life. There is no reason they need to be flying at the same time to judge their service life. Furthermore there was plenty of time for evaluation postwar. It's telling that Meteors continued to be manufactured post-war but the Czeck plant producing Me262 was shut down as soon as alternatives were available. Despite having the ability to buy whatever materials and fuel they needed the engine just plain didn't work. Me262 weren't much faster then prop planes either. The Meteors weren't used offensively because the British didn't want the Germans reverse engineering their jet engines. That meant that Meteors had very few targets because German offensive air was so rare at the end of the war. Also I will caution you that many reports of how effective planes were in WWII use the extremely naive assumption of taking wartime claims at face value. This produces ridiculous exaggerations on all sides but is particularly bad with Germans late in the war and worse yet when it comes to pilots with propaganda value such as those assigned the Me262. Going by the numbers the Germans were claiming to have shot down you would think the allied air forces were on their last legs.
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