Over in the WWII thread, a Strelok made the claim the North Carolina could keep a target lock on a ship regardless of what type of evasive maneuvers were being done due to how the gun stabilizers and fire control systems were designed to handle it from the drawing-board. A few months ago, I was watching a video from Drachinifel, during which he mentions this claim and says that the North Carolina could only do this after WWII was over due to post-war fire control equipment upgrades and would not have been able to do that during the war due to those upgrades not being installed. I am not saying either one of them is right or wrong, but is there more information like gunnery test records during WWII that would help clarify that claim? To me it seems like yes the NoCo could have possibly done it, but the stress and possible hull damage it could have caused to the ship make it seem more like a last resort option. Screenshot is of Strelok's comment in question and the video clip is the relevant part of Drachinifel's video.

>>11132 >Drachinifel If he opens his mouth on any ship type that isn't British, there's a 90% chance he's wrong and a 50% chance he's straight up lying. Hearing him drone about the Bismarck/Tirpitz is especially painful even though I don't even like that class. If you're wanting the test records, I unfortunately don't have those test results on me anymore, hard drive failure. But I got them off the internet in the first place, so they're likely still accessible. That being said, to make a logical argument, the requirements were the MK 38 GFCS (since the first variant of the system was capable of this) and the main turrets having fully stable verticals. Neither system could have been retrofitted onto the ships without extremely obvious work being done. The USS North Carolina received legitimate NO post-war modifications (in the terms of what the navy considered modifications), so there was never any chance for this to have been done. >To me it seems like yes the NoCo could have possibly done it, but the stress and possible hull damage it could have caused to the ship make it seem more like a last resort option. You would be mostly correct, as noted in your referenced post: only the Iowas were actually designed to do it, and even they took damage from it. But engaging in direct combat verses other battleships already was a last resort option for Battleships, so you pretty much pulled out all the stops when you got into it regardless. Stress-related hull damage was the least of your concerns.

>>11133 Clarifying my vitriol, Drach isn't actually that bad, but he tends to allow gross incorrect data into his analysis of basically any other ships and fleets than the UK's as long as it makes the Brits look better. Oftentimes, he'll make statements based on things someone on a video game forum told him years ago despite never attempting to verify the claims.

>>11133 >>11134 > I unfortunately don't have those test results on me anymore, hard drive failure That is unfortunate. I would have like to look over those reports, but I can hunt them down if they are still on the internet. >The USS North Carolina received legitimate NO post-war modifications (in the terms of what the navy considered modifications) I can believe that due to the fact that almost immediately after WWII the Navy's budget was cut considerably and most of the fleet was either mothballed or scrapped. I don't see the Navy at the time deciding to spend a bunch of time, money, and material upgrading a ship that will be almost immediately mothballed then/or scrapped. >But engaging in direct combat verses other battleships already was a last resort option for Battleships, so you pretty much pulled >out all the stops when you got into it regardless. Yea, when you have 12-18in battleship shells hitting you a little bit of stress damage from firing the main guns during extreme evasive maneuvers is far down on the concerns list. However, there is not a lot of pure battleship vs battleship engagements in WWII to draw examples from. If memory serves correct, other than Washington and South Dakota engaging Kirishima during the Guatalcanal Campaign and "maybe" the Battle of Surigao Straight. Other than those two examples, I cant think off-hand of another time when a fast battleship went toe-to-toe with another battleship or equivalent with no air support helping either side with bombing and torpedo attacks. >Clarifying my vitriol, Drach isn't actually that bad, but he tends to allow gross incorrect data into his analysis of basically any other >ships and fleets than the UK's as long as it makes the Brits look better. I agree with your assessment about Drach and, in truth, you should never trust what anything or anyone say as 100% true and use multiple sources to draw your own conclusions. Lots of people just parrot information they see without further researching it. Drach dose make for a good starting point if I need to find out more background information about a British ship or an engagement where the British were heavily involved (Battle of Jutland, Force Z, etc). Lately for me that has been gathering information on various British warships and making a list of which ones I would like to have as a RC model.

Redpill me on the armor belt of a battleship, does it really help or is it just a meme?

>>11136 The belt armor can do an lot depending on the ranges involved in terms of shellfire or the attack profile of a given missile, or it can be a lot of weight that doesn't directly do much. In short, any munition which strikes the side of a armored ship's hull is going to have to defeat the armor belt in order to cause significant battle-killing damage to the ship. If it bypasses the side of the hull, then it's the deck armor's domain. For classical naval engagements, any shellfire from inside of 17,000 yards had a significant chance of hitting the belt, from there to around 22,000 yards and it was in the 50-50 range, beyond that and it was steadily more likely for it to hit deck armor. Most battleship engagements in history happened within that 22,000 yard range. Furthermore, mines and suicide boats tended to impact the sides of the hulls, as well as surface riding torpedoes; so all of these would have to contend with the belt armor in order to penetrate the hull - of course, for a (partially) underwater explosion weapon like this, there is more to it than just the belt armor, but the belt helps. For modern threats, you still have the mines and suicide boats (the USS Stark was saved by a slightly thicker strake of metal, had it been armored like even a Cleveland or Atlanta it would have taken far less damage overall), but you also have sea-skimming side attack missiles. Very few AShMs have the raw power to blast through 5+ inches of steel and still cause significant damage deep enough into a ship to put it out of commission. As to actually 'defeating' the belt armor conventionally (as in not just bypassing it), that is another can of worms that requires a PHD in both Physics and Metallurgy to accurately explain. But suffice to answer your question, it actually helps, but it's not a 100% sure thing and only works against things that target its area (which is a lot more stuff than people seem to think).

>>11137 Is there a point to up-armoring turret roofs with CNTs to protect against ASBMs or are those better dealt by interceptor missiles and/or evasive maneuvering?

>>11137 I guess it's a big can of worms, but in general, how would the armour scheme of a modern ship with supermaterials look like? I mean, something like the good old distributed armour scheme, but the belt and the top armour should have the same thickness, and the superstructure is just one big box that is similarly protected? Or that would be too ridiculous even with nanoplates (even if we ignore the monetary issues)?

>>11138 If you're going to start introducing CNT-based armor, then likely. Assuming we are talking about a battleship or cruiser armed with a heavy gun-based artillery battery. In those cases, the turret roofs are the easiest vulnerability to hit for precision missiles. Of course, directly answering your question, ALL incoming munitions are better dealt with by hard-killing the munition/source or evading it, it doesn't matter if it's an ASBM, and AShM, or a 7.62mm someone is standing on a boat shooting at you with. This is where the old 'Threat Onion' comes into play. For a Warship in the missile age, it is: Don't be Seen (Evade the Threat), Don't be Targeted (Spoof the Threat), Don't be Hit (Kill the Threat), Don't be Penetrated (Block the Threat), Don't be Killed (Survive the Threat). Armor is in the 4th Layer, which is basically the last layer if you're trying to prevent serious damage. Ideally, you defeat the threat on a layer further out on the onion. Of course, something will get through, even if it's just fragmentation. Armor is to protect against that inevitability being the fatal blow. >>11139 You're right, that's a topic that would require entire libraries to actually convey with 100% accuracy; libraries full of books I am not qualified to write. However, in the most general of terms... If you're talking a ship utilizing supermaterials such as CNT nanoplates, it depends on how much you intend to armor and what you are trying to do with that armor. If you're just trying to protect the vitals of the ship in order to prevent a complete loss, then the armor would be boxes around the vitals - much like the all-or-nothing scheme of yesteryear. If your point is to prevent as much crew death as possible, then the armor would essentially be built into the hull and superstructure of the ship - it would look like what the exterior of the ship looks like, just set in a little with internal boxes around the components that must be exposed to the outside (such as radar). This would also prevent a complete loss of the ship, but the ship could be rendered blind, deaf, and dumb by critical hits on the exposed electronics. Strategic weapon systems and heavy gun-based artillery likely would still work however, so if your ship's purpose is throwing strategic munitions at fixed targets, this would likely prevent a mission kill. If you are trying to prevent mission kills for tactical systems (the goal of the armor in yesteryear), you encounter the reason why Modern Navies gave up on armor (aside from the weight). Modern Navies don't see the point in armor because the difficulty in armoring the abundance of externally mounted sensitive electronics such as the massive radar panels that have become bog standard anymore, most of which could easily be destroyed with as little as a hand grenade or the smallest shard of fragmentation. Armoring the Radar is actually possible as well, but armored electronics have to either be 'peek-a-boo' style or mammothian. In either case, their effective power per unit of volume is going to be drastically lower than the exposed type, making the resulting ship a veritable leviathan if you intend for it to have comparable signals/ECM power to the more vulnerable ships. It's entirely possible, though; especially if you're willing to accept more limited sensors on the ship, it would just be extremely expensive and time consuming to build and operate.

>>11135 >However, there is not a lot of pure battleship vs battleship engagements in WWII to draw examples from. There were a few, but you never hear about them because no Americans were involved: >Lofoten >Calabria >Cape Spartivento >Denmark Strait >North Cape There's evidence of battleships doing hard zigzags in every listed action except North Cape (where both sides kept steaming in a straight line to maximize speed).

>>11141 As long as you aren't trying to insinuate that planned and coordinated zig-zag maneuvers are the extreme evasive maneuvers that the post Strelok posted an image of, I'd agree with you on everything except the Battle of Denmark Straight never being heard of - it's literally the most famous Battleship on Battleship(/-cruiser) engagement in history. In most cases, the zig-zags were planned into the fire cycles, holding a zig or zag long enough for the gun and FC to stabilize and then take a shot before turning again. The time they were shifting from zig to zag or vice versa and re-stabilizing was used to watch the fall of shot; considering the 35 to 50 second times of flight at the expected battle ranges , this pretty much allowed them to fire at reasonable accuracy and fire-rate while still having a modicum of unpredictability since every shot the enemy took basically had to guess whether they would zig in or zag out..

Last week the US christened and launched a new Freedom-class LCS. In unrelated news, the current proposed USN budget calls for 9 of the 16 Freedom-class LCSs to be decommissioned early, on the grounds that they are unable to perform their intended role, since the technology and systems that were supposed to be developed for them were complete failures.

>>11140 Too bad we don't go for white elephant flagships anymore, a modern dreadnought would be interesting to see, however impractical.

>>11144 You must be new here.

>>11144 Instead of throwing $40 billion into a useless shithole like Ukraine, I would much rather use that money to make a modern 100,000 ton super battleship. I would love to see what such a project would come up with on that budget even if it would be modernizing an older design.

In the event of societal collapse and a failed state how would the merchant vessels and submarines play into it? They could wield a lot of power and autonomy for being able to run away from conflict and make dealings with port towns and become some sort of pillar of power but not too much so because of the fuel they need to restock, being essentially a moving castle with all that entails or sub-society.

>>11147 Just look at navy in sengoku era japan. Every warlord wants you and there is nothing that can stop you or tie you down from just fucking off

>>11146 Problem with that is that politicians can't steal money from that as easily because they still have to produce a battleship while sending money to their favorite jew comedian let's them skim as much off the top as they want since anything they actually send to Ukraine gets hoovered up by the Russians after they either A. Kill all the conscripts as they do some insane suicide charge or B. The Ukies fucking leave it all behind as they all abandon their posts. So nobody can call the politicians out on skimming millions off the top of the "aid" since it will never be seen by western eyes again anyway.

>>11149 It is still fun to imagine what a modern BB would look like with a massive budget to fund it and the logistics chain to support it. Even if in reality most of the money would be skimmed and what you would get is something like a BB version of the Zumwalt or Ford-class carriers. >>11146 I have been looking at that image and I don't know if the person who made it messed up or the Japs had some future replacement for the Type 96 in the works besides their horrible attempt at copying the 40mm Bofors. Anyone else have an idea on what the AA guns might be? Pic is what I think the possible anti-air guns might be.

>>11150 I'm rather sure that those are meant to be the Bofors copies put into turrets similar to what the Yamatos had for the 25mm guns in their original configuration. These drawings seem to represent what the Japanese would have wanted to build if the war went quite differently so that they don't have to cancel pretty much everything and also manage to unfuck their AAA situation.

>>11150 >>11151 It's important to warn that Tzoli has a very unique take on the what ifs of warship design in that era and has very, very limited understanding of what is or isn't possible in terms of naval architecture. He quite often insists that three-gun or even four-gun turrets could be positioned in locations that they do not have the structural support to be placed, will add turrets to locations that would have to be machinery space, place secondary/tertiary guns in the blast cones the main battery, and so on. You would think he would have developed a sense for these things when he has been doing this as a hobby for 12+ years, but apparently studying even the slightest bit of Naval Architecture is too much for him, but I digress. So, while nice to look at and a starting point of what-ifs, unless directly lifted from extant plans or scuttlebutt of designs, his what-if designs are generally engineering impossibilities from the Strangereal of Warships. Itself not actually a strong negative, it's just something you have to keep in mind.

Speaking of Japanese ships and guns, it's a bit strange how lazy they were with the secondaries when it came to modernization, especially with the Kongou-class. They pretty much just added 25mm autocannons and 127mm AA guns, and if they needed additional weight or space the solution was to get rid of a pair of casemate guns. Of course they wanted to completely replace them with brand new units, so using these ships in itself was just meant to be a temporary solution, but it still looks quite bad compared to e.g. Tennessee.

>>11153 It was mainly a money, resource, time, and hull count issue. They had a very limited number of hulls and very limited resources while the US wasn't exactly hurting for anything but fuel tankers. They were putting a majority of their resources into new destroyers, and they couldn't afford to take their most effective surface warfare assets off the front line for the amount of time the refits would take. The US on the other hand had a lot of their battleship force knocked out of the fight early, requiring major repairs, so they basically had no reason not to perform the refit while they already had the ships in the docks for repairs.

>>11154 Not to start an argument, but if I understand correctly, they had properly gut their battlecruisers to upgrade their machine, and they also put in quite a lot of work into the superstructures in the 1930s, and that's why I find it a bit strange. It's like they wanted to keep some of the 140mm guns just to have something for anti-surface work, but they also thought that the original 1910s battery was unnecessary at that point. Really, I'd just like to get into the head of whoever was in charge of these rebuilds.

>>11155 During the period the Kongou-class rebuilds were taking place, nobody was doing the kind secondary battery upgrade you're talking about, though. The American refits you're referring to only happened because the war. Pre-war, the US's refits of their battle line basically came down to the addition of small/medium AA (.50cal/1.1in) and 5in/25cal (or 5in/38cal later on) HAA, while nixing casemate guns if they needed additional weight or topside space. Basically the Japanese and the Americans were doing the same exact thing as each other. Incidentally, the British, French, and Italians were also doing basically the same thing during that time period, with new constructing receiving better. Even though it wasn't by any means the best, it was entirely good enough according to the understanding of the time period, they weren't being lazy about it in that regard. Also, aside from the immediate amidships casemates, the casemate mounts that were removed from the Kongou sisters were all at high risk of washing out during inclement weather, rough seas, or high speeds. Basically every navy was welding over those casemates after the advancement of boiler technology took the battle line speed up to 21kts+ from 17kts.

>>11150 The mounts next to the turret are rocket launchers. I'm more concerned with that non-Euclidian quarterdeck. >>11153 That's because they were refitted in the early 30s, back when truly effective DP guns didn't really exist. Contemporary US rebuilds made the same compromise.

>>11157 Does anyone have the screencap of the story of the russian baltic fleet? I forgot to save it.

Is it possible to make a capital ship for the explicit purpose of being nearly literally invulnerable to all current offensive technology?

>>11159 Possible? Easily. Practical? Who's to say. Even without getting into super-technologies such as Nanocomposite Armors, you could very easily do it with modern, proven, and extant technologies. Give it Nuclear Power, fully Integrated Electrical Propulsion, Kevlar/Steel Composite Armor, an excellent Central Fire Control System, and cover the thing in HELs as if they are 40mm Bofors Quad mounts and it's WW2 all over again. HELs can even be used in the blue-green spectrum for hard-kill anti-torpedo defense. Obviously, the sensors are a weakness; so put the major sensors in armored revolving door/pop-up mounts programmed to automatically slam the doors shut (metaphorically speaking) if a threat is on a probable impact trajectory (taking into consideration fragmentation), and use peek-a-boo or (more likely) off axis sensors (which aren't in the line of fire) to guide close-in systems. Your result is an absolutely massive leviathan of a ship, but one that is basically invulnerable to anything short of direct hits with a nuke. It would cost just about as much as you'd expect, though, and likely would get one or more nukes thrown at it in a full blown war; plus I don't even want to imagine the headaches trying to get the port infrastructure required to maintain the thing built and manned.

>>11160 I was thinking something more oriented towards active point defences instead of a floating punching back but unironically thanks for your input.

>>11161 >I was thinking something more oriented towards active point defences That's pretty much exactly what I described, though? High Energy Lasers are pretty much the pinnacle of Active Point Defense weapons with proven, extant technology. The passive defenses such as general armor and the armored sensors are so that any theoretical fragmentation from destroyed close calls don't disable any vital components (such as the sensors or power plant) making the ship a sitting duck.

>>11159 You can't make an invincible ship because nothing afloat can survive nukespam, but you can certainly make one that's unreasonably hard to mission-kill without nukes (or reactivating the Iowas, since true immunity to heavy guns is impractical). A decent secondary battery of 3-5" automatic guns can, with appropriate ammo and fire-control, intercept almost any ASM in service (except maybe Kalibr) with decent reliability. SAMs can also help, but will be exhausted fast and are generally a last resort. Smaller-caliber CIWS acts as the last line of defense. A 12" belt and a 6" deck can stop anything that slips through. For exposed, noncritical systems (secondary armaments, uptakes etc.) you'd need 3-6" all around to protect against the most common threat (slow maneuvering missiles with huge HE payloads). For essential systems like the primary armament and conning tower, 18" armor with ERA may be appropriate in case something like a P-15 somehow gets through. Any missile launchers, aside from the smallest of SAMs, should use arm-type launchers with magazines inside the citadel. The launchers themselves can maybe be shielded. For torpedo defense: noisemakers and towed decoys to avoid the torpedoes, Russian-style ASW rockets to kill the ones that can't be tricked, and very deep torpedo bulkheads to survive anything you can't avoid or kill. Torpedoes to the keel are still a threat, I can't think of any real defense against that. (Maybe something to trick the proximity detonators into firing early?) Diesel-electric propulsion gives you the best subdivision and shock resistance of any arrangement. Space out the props and put half of them on a different circuit from the others to prevent a mobility kill from one lucky hit. This ship won't be very fast, but at least it'll be reasonably fuel-efficient. Surround the radars with CIWS and exercise good EMCON to defeat ARMs. Just in case, the important sensors can be arranged with plenty of redundancy so that any one loss won't leave you with a huge blind spot. As a last resort, the ship should be able to fire all offensive weapons using only local fire-control and the ship's datalink. The superstructure should be built to survive ASM hits and ensuing fires near the base, which is difficult and weight-inefficient but certainly possible. The masts would need to be fairly short as a consequence, or it'll be Fusou levels of top-heavy. No active-radar ASM is smart enough to intentionally aim high up in the superstructure. The resulting vessel is probably a little bigger than a supercarrier, with speed and firepower comparable to a treaty battleship. The only way to stop it is to either employ multiple nuclear weapons, repeatedly attack it with submarines, hit it with hundreds of nearly simultaneous heavy ASMs and hope you get lucky, or reactivate the Iowas. >>11159 >>11162 >laser CIWS >proven, extant technology

>>11163 Yes, Lasers are proven, extant technology. The first successful Solid State Laser shoot down was over 10 years ago, the first deployable system was ready for market in 2008; purportedly, both the Americans and Russians have tested their HELs against targets up to the Hypersonic range, but they are the Americans and Russians, take their claims with salt. In short, the Americans have SSLs, the Germans have SSLs, the Russians have SSLs, the Japanese have SSLs, even the Chinese have cobbled together an SSL system. At this point, the HEL is as proven and extant as the 40mm Bofors was in 1938 and has shot down almost as many test targets worldwide. Also, ERA at sea is a terrible idea, but I agree with the rest of your points if you were designing a more practical Battleship equivalent.

>>11163 >or reactivating the Iowas, since true immunity to heavy guns is impractical Considering that the best defence is offence, could you just try to outgun the Iowas?

>>11160 >sensors Why not omit long-range sensors/radar from the capital (Battle)ship and have an escort feed it targeting data instead?

>>11163 >nothing afloat can survive nukespam Why not? A combination of mobility, early warning sensors, air defences and ABMs could prevent everything except USA or Russia nuke spamming the wider area you sail in.

>>11165 I think having the farthest and most accurate sensors (and spotters) is more important than having the biggest guns in most cases.

>>11166 Two reasons, one obvious the other less obvious. First: Because then the capital ship is only as strong as the escorts, once the escorts are dealt with the capital ship is vulnerable to boarding and seizure. Second: 988ms Ping.

>>11169 >988ms ping Even with line of sight laser comms? >once the escorts are dealt with the capital ship is vulnerable to boarding and seizure. All escorts being dead implies that WW3 has kicked off the capital ship itself has already been mission killed in some way, and for the ship to be vulnerable to boarding and seizure any would-be Somalians would have to get past its remaining armaments, crew and scuttling charges of which there should still be a reasonable number left unless the ship was disabled by nuke shells.

How effective are Aegis networks against aircraft without predictable courses? Are ships' anti-air somehow more effective against maneuverable targets than the questionably effective land-based batteries like Patriots and S-300s?

>>11170 >Even with line of sight laser comms? Laser Data Transmission is unreliable when both transmitter and receiver are both pitching and rolling at rates unpredictable in relation to each other. Unpredictable is not something you want in your self-defense grid when missing even a single packet can have devastating consequences. Also, the point of the ship in question is to be as near invulnerable as possible; there is no point in such a ship if sinking the comparatively extremely vulnerable escorts not only mission kills the ship, but causes the loss of tens of billions of dollars of (at this point) basically unscathed capital ship; the ship must be self-reliant enough that at the minimum it can stand and fight until replacement escorts arrive, but the ideal is that its escorts are smaller, highly defensible (if not almost as invulnerable) ships - which makes this sensor issue a moot point anyway, since you still have to protect sensors somewhere. >>11171 >How effective are Aegis networks against aircraft without predictable courses? This is a hard one to answer, because to a certain degree AEGIS and other similar systems exist specifically to make unpredictable threat trajectories (/courses) predictable. Even wildly maneuvering missiles (the most unpredictable of all aircraft) are to a certain degree predictable, because you can reach a conclusion on where the missile will be based on where it is, where it was, when it was there, and where it wants to go. In short, the missile-knows-where-it-is.mp4 but for AA targeting. While AEGIS is getting a bit long in the tooth, from my understanding it continues to do its job well as long as the entire system is well maintained, which is unfortunately becoming rarer and rarer. >Are ships' anti-air somehow more effective against maneuverable targets than the questionably effective land-based batteries Mainly due to the sheer number of advantages that sea-based platforms have, such as raw available bulk, sensor size, known friendly locations, the ability to just assume the threat already knows about said friendlies, and the generally wide open spaces that are the open ocean (even around landmasses, the water is generally far more open than where land-based systems have to act unless they are in a desert). Even the shortest detection time (short range, hyper-sonic sea skimming missiles) IIRC gives the ship between 9 and 12 seconds to react to the threat. 9 seconds is an eternity for a land based system, which usually has around 4 to 6 seconds. Land Based fixed installations (such as AEGIS Ashore) tend to have roughly the same capability as sea based platforms, however. Advantage of being a prepared defensive location that any given enemy is well aware about, no need for concealment and you can have those massive radar arrays blaring wildly. A Patriot/THAAD or S-300 battery would get SEAD'd in a heartbeat if they were to try the same. Obviously, all of that is just as to my limited understanding. Not a land guy.

The question of SEAD makes me wonder how effective spark gap transmitters are as a poor man's barrage jammer against modern day anti-radiation missiles.

>>11172 >>11166 >>11169 Do carrier fleet escorts provide any significant advantage over having all their sensors and firepower on a single ship other than not being a single target? I mean sensors' range, power and resolution, weapons load and crews' coordination would be more volume, energy and cost effective on a single ship of the same tonnage as the entire carrier fleet since it could have more room for weapons, a single massive power source like a nuclear reactor, larger sensors and an onboard supercomputer.

>>11174 Carriers require a lot of space to operate, and even Battleships prefer to have said space and forewarning. As the Sensors of Escorts are centered on the Escort themselves, and Escorts are usually positioned many miles away from the ship they are escorting, having escorts extends both the maximum and minimum range for Radar (since the radar horizon is different in different locations) and creates a much wider sonar net. Note, the Capital Ship being escorted is the last line of defense; the rest of the fleet is either support for that Capital Ship or are sacrificial pawns meant to take the blows for said Capital Ship; every escort ship adds to the layers of defense because they either expand or solidify the network of defense around the capital ship. As for Carriers specifically, Carriers are extremely hard to actually armor properly. Their flight decks actually can be well armored - most Supercarriers' decks actually are armored - but they can't armor most of the vital components that have to be exposed for them to do their jobs. Namely the arrestor wire systems, the catapults, and most importantly the aircraft themselves. Covered flight decks have been tried, they ''technically' can perform the absolute minimums required to call a ship a carrier, but saying they're bad for carrier operations is an understatement. So the Carrier's best line of protection is simply don't get hit in the first place. This can either be achieved with a massive network of escorts and a modestly defended Carrier (US Navy current concept) or a medium escort and a heavily armed Carrier (Late-WW2 US style shown best for the time by the original configuration Midway-class or in the cold-war by the Russian/Soviet concept seen in the earlier image). Either way, the escorts are vital to allow the Carrier enough time to react to the threat - the same would be true for a hypothetical well armed and armored Battleship, the Escorts are primarily there to extend and reinforce the engagement/sensor range verses hostiles, not to supplant the Capital Ship's own engagement/sensor profiles.

>>11175 Intuitively I know you are right but in peer vs peer scenario would not sending a PT boat with a rudimentary radar to expand the horizon be more cost effective than practically sacrificing a Ticonderoga just to expand SAM's range by a few tens of kilometers?

>>11176 A PT Boat would have such a low radar array/disk that there wouldn't really be any point in deploying the boat where the Capital ship could still 'see' it. The Capital Ship would likely have superior radar range than the PT Boat at that distance, and the ships being able to 'see' each other is important, especially when communications go down and each ship is trying to guess what is happening with their immediate neighbors (which informs them what they need to be doing if they don't have any significant emotional events occurring onboard their own ship). You need at minimum a heavy frigate to function as an Capital Escort. Also, due to the prevalence of Sea Skimming missiles, adding just ~20km to the effective detection/engagement range of the anti-missile grid is a 100% increase in the amount of time the Capital Ship has to react to said missile.

Is it possible to misdirect a radar-guided AShM into hitting a specific, extra well armored part of a ship's hull or at least make the missile fly in a vector that's slightly easier to hit by interceptors and CIWS?

>>11178 It is very possible, most ECM today is rigged to misdirect incoming missiles to give a predictable flight path if it cannot spoof it into missing the ship entirely. Doesn't always work, obviously, and some missiles are either too dumb or too smart to trick; but that's one of the reasons why AShMs aren't often ARMs - way too predictable of flight paths.

How powerful are the second and third tier navies of the world? I'm mostly thinking of the euro ones, although I'm not even sure which European navies amount to anything nowadays.

>>11180 Last I checked the French still maintained quite a navy and the Australians manage one of the most specialized if not small navies in the world. I think for the most part any country outside of Africa with access to warm water ports likely has a decent enough naval presence to making fighting them painful, even if doable. India's Navy is considered rather "small" compared to its neighbors, but they maintain almost 20 submarines and an aircraft carrier. Indonesia, one of the largest Muslim majority countries in the world (also not the richest outside the Christian cities), maintains 2 submarines, a few corvettes/frigates, and a repurposed Japanese pseudo-aircraft carrier in its bluewater fleet, however its coastguard, greenwater fleet and hybrid blue-green fleet (what matters for the territory) maintains a fairly expansive set of vessels whether it's mining boats, amphibious assault boats, missile boats, etc.

Point being, While conquerable it would not be palatable to the large navies to do so due to their own losses. Polite sage.

Is any anon ITT autistic enough to spoonfeed me a family tree of all modern warships above the size of corvette?

>>11183 My knowledge of ships starts and ends at "it floats and has big guns on it, that one carries planes." Sorry, anon.

>>11184 I'd wiki it myself but I am a tad too full on Academic obligations ATM and already amassed way more procrastinations than I can afford.

>>11183 My understanding is fairly limited, but from that understanding, you have several lineages for each ship type. Torpedo boats, being fast, small ships designed for attacking bigger ships, begat destroyers and fast attack craft. Cruisers, which were initially distinguished between being unprotected, protected (having an armored deck), and armored (having a belt of armor on their sides), evolved into light, heavy, and battle cruisers, respectively. Battleships evolved from the ironclad, which then evolved into the dreadnoughts. They were later limited by the Washington Treaty in both quantity made and displacement, forcing many nations to build smaller ships. Then there are the super-heavy battleships like the IJN Yamato and the USN Iowa. Carriers were initially converted into battleships or battlecruisers. Their roles diversified into escort carriers, light carriers, fleet, and supercarriers. There's probably some more to it, but like I said, I'm don't know all of it.

Could hypersonic missiles be the end of carriers? As it stands, while China still can't get 20km accuracy in a desert, Russia seems to be using them fairly efficiently when they've tested them out in Ukraine. Unanchored smaller ships are probably too small to use them accurately at the moment since the ship is jostled around too much by the waves (relative to a stationary target), but an aircraft carrier can be about 1-3 skyscrapers in length which seems plenty big enough if you can calculate its trajectory. >>11186 I don't know much but that seems fairly accurate for the bluewater vessels. >>11183 I wouldn't bother with greenwater vessels and hybrid bluewater/greenwater vessels since once you get into the smaller ship sizes

Is brass still the best material for propellers, or are there are weird and crazy proposals floating around for some alternative material?

>>11187 >Could hypersonic missiles be the end of carriers? As it stands, while China still can't get 20km accuracy in a desert, Russia seems to be using them fairly efficiently when they've tested them out in Ukraine. Unanchored smaller ships are probably too small to use them accurately at the moment since the ship is jostled around too much by the waves (relative to a stationary target), but an aircraft carrier can be about 1-3 skyscrapers in length which seems plenty big enough if you can calculate its trajectory. From what I understand, the real limiting factor is the killchain when going after something like a CBG. Even with hypersanec, your firing solution at launch is going to be out of date by the time the weapon gets wherever it's going, so you have to update it in real time, which not everybody can do (though if anyone else can, it'd be the Russians or the bugs). There's also that nagging little issue of killing a CBG being a pretty surefire way to kick off Round Three, which no one is really in a position to seriously consider at the moment. The only two powers with the strategic ass to do it have no reason to; the bugs can just sit back and watch the Jews destroy us from the inside while they (the bugs) play the long game, and the Russians are content merely to defend (and, as opportunity presents itself, expand) their regional hegemony. tl;dr it's theoretically possible, but I'm not seeing the carrier's swan song any time soon. Especially when there's really no substitute when it comes to force projection and gunboat diplomacy. >>11188 I see some vague mention of composite materials on Wikipedia, but nothing concrete. "If it ain't broke", I guess.

I know the question gets thrown around plenty about a US-Chinese engagement in the South China Sea, but does China actually have any proper deterrents to stop submarine strikes? That seems to be a glaring weakness that they are trying and failing to fix right now. >>11189 >tl;dr it's theoretically possible, but I'm not seeing the carrier's swan song any time soon. Especially when there's really no substitute when it comes to force projection and gunboat diplomacy. Sounds like the F35 may serve an actual niche in being launchable from smaller ships then, but that the technology probably still has a couple decades before it becomes a real threat to ships.

Royal Navy HMS Prince of Wales breaks down off south coast https://archive.ph/F8g2D >The Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is limping back to shore after breaking down shortly after embarking for exercises in the US. The carrier left from Portsmouth Naval Base on Saturday before an "emerging mechanical issue" occurred. On Monday, the warship was moving slowly from the south east of the Isle of Wight towards Stokes Bay, Gosport. It is understood the sheltered area will make it easier for divers to examine the damage. The Royal Navy previously confirmed the 65,000-tonne vessel was in the South Coast Exercise Area. The warship's departure was planned for Friday, but had been delayed because of a technical issue. The Royal Navy was not able to offer any further details or confirm if the earlier technical issue was related to the mechanical problem. >Specialist website Navy Lookout has reported that the issue was caused by damage to the starboard propeller shaft, although the MoD has not confirmed or commented on this. The website says a photograph of the carrier leaving Portsmouth shows only a wake on the port side suggesting a problem with the other propeller shaft. It states that, unless the problem can be resolved at sea enabling the warship to continue its journey to the US, it might need to go into dry dock at Rosyth in Scotland early, ahead of a planned inspection in 2023. >The Nato flagship was sailing to undertake training exercises with the US Navy as well as the Royal Canadian Navy and United States Marine Corps. The warship, built at Rosyth at a cost of £3bn, had a colourful send-off on Saturday as it passed thousands of revellers at the Victorious Festival on Southsea Common. Old news by now, but it's a bit sad to see how low they have fallen. At this rate Argentina might as well restart this whole Falklands business.

>>11189 Why were eastern bloc anti-ship missiles , like the Kitchen, always high supersonic (mach 3+) while NATO ones like Harpoon and Exocet subsonic? What was so different in their doctrine?

>>11191 >it Fucking AP mafia trying to kill millennia old traditions.

>>11191 >broken propeller shaft At this point, I'm under the impression that the name Prince of Wales is just cursed. >>11192 Stealth and accuracy, more or less. High speed missiles are easier to detect and and harder to make sea skimming (that didn't stop the Russians from doing it, however); somewhat ironically, those slower missiles (earlier on) were also harder to hit for CIWS due to generally having more fuel during the terminal phase, being more able to afford terminal maneuvering, but this 'advantage' was minimal (and the US for one never took advantage of it). The math on making those missiles accurate is also a lot easier for slower missiles.

>>11192 NATO doctrine calls for everybody using a single ASM across all launch platforms, so everything has to be light enough to fit on a Harrier. For that weight, you can have any two of speed, range and payload. The Soviets didn't make this compromise, so the bombers carry a missile that's four times the weight of a Harpoon while the destroyers carry a missile that weighs as much as a Harrier.

>>11195 Sounds a bit paradoxical the reverse wasn't the case. The alliance of history's richest militaries opting for the low tech logistically sound solution while the history's poorest superpower spending trillions of rubbles to fancy wunderwaffen.

>>11196 It makes more sense if you mostly take out money from the equation: there is a force with lots units to be equipped, so they opt for a good enough solution; and the enemy has a limited number of units, so they might as well try to make up for quantity with quality (or just raw firepower), because they will still spend significantly less money even if they spurge a bit. It's roughly similar to small armies buying high quality guns for their soldiers.

I wonder how well the German pre-Dreadnoughts would have fared in ww2 if they decided to keep as many of them as possible, and converted them into monitors. I imagine something along these lines: >give them some really big bulged that make them virtually invulnerable against torpedoes >keep them 2x2 28cm main guns and the 14 pieces of 17cm guns that make up the secondary battery >get rid of the torpedo launchers and the old 8.8cm guns, and instead put as many dual-purpose 8.8cm (or 10.5cm) guns and AA autocannons on them as you can fit >replace the engines with turbines or diesel, just so that they can still have a reasonable speed for this line of work >also slap on extra armour if you can After the end of ww1 they still had all 5 Braunschweig-class ships and 5 Deutschland-class pre-Dreadnoughts, although 3 of the former and 1 of the latter were scrapped by 1933. Still, 4 of them converted into 1940s floating batteries could have been useful at the siege of Leningrad considering how much trouble the coastal artillery gave to the Heer.

>>11198 >After the end of ww1 they still had all 5 Braunschweig-class ships and 5 Deutschland-class pre-Dreadnoughts, Fucked that up, they only had 4 Deutschlands, because one of them was lost at Jutland. Still, the math checks out, they had a total of 4 ships between the two classes when the Nazis came into power.

>>11198 For the few engagements they would have been useful, I can't imagine them doing poorly; but I can't imagine them actually changing the outcome of anything either.

>>11200 To be fair, to change the outcome anything related to ww2 would require some fundamental changes to German strategy to the point that any tactical considerations are meaningless. These pre-Dreadnoughts just seem to be one of the many potentials they carelessly wasted, because they clearly had no idea what to do with them, and in the end they were just used as floating AA batteries.

I have a question regarding the Queen Elizabeth class carriers. Are there any benefits to having a carrier with two islands compared to a one island carrier? To me, having a second island would not be worth losing deck space that could be used by aircraft, even though you could use the second island as a backup in case of battle damage. Also, are the downsides of a ski jump deck (aircraft can't load as much fuel and munitions as normal, which impacts mission scope) worth it when looking at it from a budget perspective (you can design and operate a smaller carrier, which can have lower operating costs)? I see that a lot of smaller navies use ski jumps on their carriers while the USN dose not, which I assume is because the USN can afford to build massive super-carriers and is not worried too much with the size and cost of the carriers.

>>11202 >Islands Forward Islands are better for navigation. Aftward Islands are better for flight operations. The QE class was basically the UK trying to have their cake and eat it too. It was not a very practical decision. >STOBAR/STOVL vs CATOBAR People often claim that CATOBARs have to be large or expensive, but the Charles de Gaulle is smaller than every major STOBAR (Kuznetsov/Liaoning/Queen Elizabeth) except the Vikrant and quite possibly cheaper than most of them as well. Personally, given the ski-jumps actually cause considerably more damage to the aircraft than catapults do to properly designed (for catapults) aircraft, I don't consider Ski-Jump Carriers to be worth it if you're actually trying to be serious about the whole naval aviation thing. Economically, there comes a point that you start having to replace/repair aircraft at a rate that you effectively bought a new carrier if you actually commit to the flight hours required to keep a competent naval air force. Sure, CATOBARs generally require 'heavier' built aircraft to resist the stresses, but that generally results in sturdier, longer-lasting aircraft anyway. Even the heavy-built aircraft don't like ski-jumps, you stress parts of the frame that are not meant to be stressed.

>>11203 >Aftward Islands are better for flight operations while Forwards Islands are better for navigation. I did not know that and that would explain the changes in placement of the islands on USN carriers over time from the Midway-class to the Ford-class carriers. >The QE class was basically the UK trying to have their cake and eat it too. It was not a very practical decision. I guess they decided to try out the two island setup, see how it performs, and decided if it is worth incorporating into the class that will replace the QEs. Though I am surprised that they didn't try to design something like a modernized Forrestal-class carrier. That would seem to be something that would not be too expensive for a country like Britain to build and maintain. >Stress on aircraft frames I guess the Royal Navy is counting on keeping the flight hours on the carrier aircraft low enough that they don't accumulate enough stress damage to warrant early replacement. I guess they might change their tune if a major naval conflict breaks out, but for the time being I don't see that happening.

>>11202 Would the flat deck super carrier proposals from the late 1940s be viable with modern tech if one were to put the bridge below deck and fit all the radar, radio equipment etc. on a pole/islet that takes up less space than a regular island?

>>11205 Not really. If you were wanting good stability for the delicate equipment (very important considering the weight), you would still end up with a mast with a footprint the size of the Ford-class Island, so you may as well just build the Island if you can't use that deck space anyway. Somewhat surprisingly, the Ford-class Island is already tiny, relatively speaking. Compare it to the Nimitz, in pics related. Very little deck space is actually used in either, you wouldn't be saving much space at all by converting it to a pure mast and you would be losing the old Mark 1 Eyeball when things go wrong... and they go wrong quite often, even on USN Carriers.

Today I learned that beached whales are largely a result of submarine sonars being so fucking loud that the whale flees towards anywhere where the sound isn't as bad (since a sonar can be loud enough to rupture human organs a hundred miles away). Apparently this is an open secret.

>>11207 People seem to think noise pollution doesn't matter but underwater it's terrible. Even aside from sonar, ordinary shipping noise causes a lot of harm. Back early on in covid lockdowns, when the cruise industry collapsed and international shipping was way down too, cetologists suddenly started seeing behaviours they hadn't seen before, because whales could actually communicate without being drowned out by propellers. I remember seeing one report about humpbacks, where the generally accepted view was that mother whales were mostly prevented from effectively hunting by having to babysit the calf. But once the shipping vanished, they discovered that the natural behaviour was actually that the mother would leave the calf in a sheltered spot while joining group hunts with other whales, knowing that if anything happened she'd still be able to communicate with the calf. It was only when the ocean was too loud for that communication that they were forced to stick together, making motherhood an enormously more demanding process.

>>11207 It's not really a secret, even thought it effectually is one, they concluded that much would happen back when they originally made Active Sonar as a concept. They just quite simply didn't care because human needs were considered more important than the needs of aquatic life. Whether you agree with them or not, at least they were honest about it. Today, people just tend to either ignore the inconvenient truths or exaggerate them. The whales are actually one sad element of Sonar use, whales are good for the ocean, but ffs the eco-terrorists that forced the US to be unable to use Sonar in ASW training were going on about Dolphins. Fuck dolphins, the rapist bastards.

>>11209 Is there a modern alternative to active sonar? I recall the one where some extremely high quality pictures were used to determine where a sub was based on the changes it made on the surface of the water, but I imagine that's not a 100% solution. Maybe LIDARs? And could the US Navy nag congress for cash to develop these technologies if they claimed they just want to save the whales?

>>11210 >Is there a modern alternative to active sonar? LIDAR is the most promising, and it's technically already good enough. It's just extremely expensive if you want it to be more accurate than rough estimation. It also doubles as potential future Anti-Torpedo Defense. >I recall the one where some extremely high quality pictures were used to determine where a sub was based on the changes it made on the surface of the water, but I imagine that's not a 100% solution. Correct. The problem with that method is it relies on High Altitude Aircraft or Satellites, neither of which will be operational for long in any war where hunting submarines is an issue. Of course, if you have some method of actively defending your satellites, suddenly that is a very viable option. >could the US Navy nag congress for cash to develop these technologies if they claimed they just want to save the whales? Sadly, no. They have been trying that very line for decades and haven't gotten much more than chump change. At the end of the day for all their whining about climate change and being eco-friendly, none of the big shots actually give a damn about the environment.

>>11211 >It also doubles as potential future Anti-Torpedo Defense. As in cranking up the LIDAR until it becomes an energy weapon? Could the same work on the surface, even if only to track incoming missiles?

>>11208 I think the main issue is that sound travels 60x faster (further?) underwater than it does in air. Unfortunately I can't think of a way to fix that other than passive systems, and I'm not about to sacrifice the human experience for another creature even if I feel bad for them. >>11209 >It's not really a secret, even thought it effectually is one >Today, people just tend to either ignore the inconvenient truths or exaggerate them. Yes, an open secret. >whales are good for the ocean, but ffs the eco-terrorists that forced the US to be unable to use Sonar in ASW training were going on about Dolphins. Fuck dolphins, the rapist bastards. Dolphins don't rape people (though they do rape other dolphins). That's a meme from a handful of news sites that got duped by a parody site and rolled with the story. That aside, my main concern with whales is that they really a keystone species. Not in the "phytoplankton are a carbon sink hurr durr" way but in the "whales either eat phytoplankton, krill, or small fish to prevent population blooms and then shit out the nutrients to the sea floor to sustain a large percentage of deep ocean life including the majority of deep ocean coral reefs" kind of way. The four main animals in the ocean food chain are whales, krill, phytoplankton, and those stupid small fish outnumbering humanity 10:1 that swim back and forth between mid-ocean and upper-ocean areas that I can't remember the name of are a very fragile and unfortunately very global ecosystem that sustain the majority of sea life, and the effects are pretty obvious in the fishing industry if nothing else. >>11210 >Is there a modern alternative to active sonar? Passive sonar, but you can only do so much with it. If they could change it from a high-frequency noise to a low-frequency noise then the power output wouldn't matter nearly as much (the frequency is more important than the strength in determining the number of decibels a sonar produces), but it would be an overall weaker system that couldn't travel as far. Low-frequency sonar is great for mapping out the sea floor but it doesn't work so good for finding things. >LIDAR I imagine you'd run into refraction issues in the water, but you could probably use LIDAR. You still run into an issue with LIDAR where you're sending out a high-energy high-frequency laser (or set of lasers) so you have to strike a balance between "strong enough to see in the distance" and "weak enough to not boil water." The primary reason SONARs never got more powerful was because if you gave them any more juice than some of the old soviet submarines, then suddenly the water begins to boil around the sonar revealing your location and effectively blocking your vision. In general LIDAR is better for air and SONAR is better for water.

>>11212 That's effectively what the next-gen missile defense systems in production currently do. They just attach it to a missile for active interception.

>>11212 >As in cranking up the LIDAR until it becomes an energy weapon? Effectively, yes. It mainly only 'works' (in theory) because the very same frequency range of laser required for long-distance underwater scanning also just happens to be the only laser frequency range that works well enough underwater to get any appreciable effect on target. Yes, you boil the water when you 'shoot' the torpedo and give away your location, but if the enemy is firing torpedoes at you they already know where you are. >Could the same work on the surface, even if only to track incoming missiles? I mean, that's how LIDAR already works? The issue is getting a powerful enough laser in a compact, robust, and durable enough package to be used as a directed energy weapons system. But every major military power now has a variant of solid-state laser that qualifies for this.

Don't know if you faggots care, but the newest ship in the Canadian fleet is is scheduled to return to dryfock to repair critical propulsion faults. Her sister ships are reporting serious flaws in their power generation plants as well as thousands of other deficiencies across the board. Is Irving, the primary contractor for this project to blame? The policy makers and project planners for managing the entire program poorly? Or is the military at fault for not operating their new kit safely and effectively? And more importantly, how will this affect Canada's claims to the Arctic when the purpose-built ships she's invested so much money into have so many problems?

Would the Germans have been better off in ww2 if they built no destroyers, and used those resources to build more light cruisers, or this is just a plain retarded idea? Compared to the Pacific, it's as if destroyers didn't even exists in the Atlantic, except as convoy escorts for ASW.

What do CNTs offer from a submarine perspective?

>>11218 Surprisingly not that much. We can already build hulls out of steel (or titanium) that can go farther down than the human body can safely take for prolonged periods, and lighter weight doesn't exactly help that much with a submarine because it's displacement when submerged is determined by the volume of the vessel rather than its weight (since the concept is to go underwater in the first place). In theory you could strengthen the hull to better resist cases of battle damage or sub captains attempting to get their boat to copulate with an underwater mountain, but considering the large, highly vulnerable, highly important systems that must be exposed along the hull with at most rubber to protect them, I'm not sure what the value of this would be either.

I wonder how well cluster munitions would work against modern ship. They obviously wouldn't be able to sink a modern warship, but maybe you could use them in the initial phase of an attack, because maybe they could damage the fire control system or a CIWS, making subsequent projectiles more likely to hit, and shooting down dozens of small pellets seems to be a hard task.

>>11220 Well, there actually are anti-ship cluster munitions; but from memory none of those are exactly in service for various reasons. Otherwise, with either Anti-Tank or Anti-Personnel Cluster Munitions, if you threw enough of the cluster munitions at the warship you actually have a reasonably high chance of mission killing anything short of a heavy cruiser or at least raking the topside over the coals so to speak. It absolutely would be a viable tactic if you could afford the delivery systems to do so; for pretty much the reasons you state. However, with most modern air-defense systems, one also has to wonder if it would be simpler to just ripple fire cheap rockets/missiles at the ship and force the ship to expend its SAMs and whatnot shooting down (comparatively vs. the defense's missile) cheap rockets.

US senators urge Joe Biden not to sell ‘scarce’ nuclear submarines to Australia https://archive.ph/mIcqq >Democrat and Republican lawmakers reportedly warned president that Aukus security pact could stress US submarine industrial base ‘to breaking point’ >Two top US senators have urged president Joe Biden not to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, warning it would diminish US national security given the vessels are “scarce”. The intervention confirms the US is under pressure not to sell its submarines before Australia is able to build its own as part of the Aukus alliance – meaning it could be decades before Australia gains nuclear submarines. A spokesperson for the Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, played down the leak, saying “the optimal pathway for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines is taking shape, and an announcement remains on track to be made in the first part of this year.” The Australian government is due to announce whether it plans to buy nuclear submarines from the US or UK by March. >According to US news site Breaking Defense, the Democratic senator Jack Reed, chair of the US Senate armed services committee, and the then ranking Republican senator James Inhofe, now retired, sent Biden the letter in December. Reed and Inhofe wrote that “over the past year, we have grown more concerned about the state of the US submarine industrial base as well as its ability to support the desired Aukus SSN [nuclear submarine] end state. We believe current conditions require a sober assessment of the facts to avoid stressing the US submarine industrial base to the breaking point,” they reportedly wrote. “We are concerned that what was initially touted as a ‘do no harm’ opportunity to support Australia and the United Kingdom and build long-term competitive advantages for the US and its Pacific Allies, may be turning into a zero-sum game for scarce, highly advanced US [Virginia-class submarines]. We urge you to adopt a ‘do no harm’ approach to Aukus negotiations and ensure that sovereign US national security capabilities will not be diminished as we work to build this strategic partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom over the coming decades.” >The US aims to build its own fleet of at least 60 nuclear-powered submarines but is struggling to meet its own needs. In December the US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, recommitted the Biden administration “to ensuring that Australia acquires this capability [nuclear submarines] at the earliest possible date”. But the two senators reportedly noted “just 1.2 Virginia-class [nuclear submarines] have been delivered, on average, per year over the past five years”. Selling or transferring Virginia-class submarines prior to meeting the US navy’s requirements would make it “less capable of meeting sovereign wartime and peacetime requirements”, they wrote. “Make no mistake, we recognise the strategic value of having one of our closest allies operating a world-class nuclear navy could provide in managing long-term competition with an increasingly militaristic China. However, such a goal will take decades to achieve, and we cannot simply ignore contemporary realities in the meantime.” >Marles’s spokesperson said Aukus would “significantly transform Australia’s strategic posture and the work undertaken over the last 16 months speaks to a shared mission between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States”. Australia was “grateful” for the US and UK enabling Australia to acquire a nuclear-powered submarine capability and “that important capability is not lost on us”, the spokesperson said. In September 2021, Australia tore up a $90bn conventional submarine contract with France to instead acquire nuclear submarine technology from the US or the UK as part of the new Aukus alliance. The deal created a looming capability gap, requiring the Collins-class submarines to be upgraded and their life extended until the first nuclear-propelled submarines could be made in Australia by the late 2030s. >In June, Peter Dutton, the opposition leader and former defence minister, revealed he “believed it possible to negotiate with the Americans to ­acquire, say, the first two submarines off the production line out of Connecticut”. “This wouldn’t mean waiting until 2038 for the first submarine to be built here in Australia,” he wrote. “We would have our first two subs this decade. I had formed a judgment the Americans would have facilitated exactly that.” The revelation prompted criticism from experts including Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who said this had not been agreed by the US government and it would be a “pretty serious kind of breach or leak [to disclose it]” if it had. “No boats are available before 2030 unless the US gives up its own – that would be quite remarkable – the US has been clear there is no way they can build additional submarines,” Hellyer told Guardian Australia at the time.

Is the AUKUS program some sort of a money laundering scheme, or what? I really don't understand how the Aussies buying a few expensive subs supposed to be a gamechanger.

>>11223 The frogs were supposed to supply the Australians with diesel subs before the deal fell through. Americans couldn't have that and jumped in to sell something they don't have. Typical military blundering and splooging money everywhere while it'll take decades before anything remotely concrete appears.

>>11223 As >>11224 said but to tack on three additional issues... >China would see it as a provocation >It would give US rivals an excuse to start giving out nuclear-capable weapons since America is doing it anyways >Submarine industry is struggling to stay afloat As for the third point, the US Navy has been doing something of an internal audit of their contractors after it turned out that the woman who was heat-testing steel for the last 40 years for almost all American-produced submarines was just rubber-stamping the test and not actually doing it. They caught her because she was improperly training the intern who was going to replace her and the intern reported her to the feds. Needless to say they are finding more shit was never done. By the time the Navy figured out which parts were compromised and which weren't on the subs, Chink Flu was in full swing and half the industry shut down/lost its workers to retirement, refusal to comply with vax mandates, budget deficits when the military didn't pay them on time and half their customers on the commercial side went under, etc. So I imagine the US Navy is struggling to even maintain their current sub fleets and get their current projects out ten years late, let alone expanding them.

If a naval war breaks out between China and the US, would either side have a big enough stockpile of missiles and the industry to make them for a multi-year long naval war, assuming it lasts that long? My opinion is no when you look at the production and supply issues NATO has had with supplying munitions to Ukraine. Though it would be interesting if ships like battleships and heavy cruisers are brought back into service not because the guns they have are better than missiles, but due to shells being easier to manufacture that missiles.

>>11226 A China vs. America Naval war would have the victor decided by Russia, just as the current America vs. Russia ground war will be decided by China. Ultimately it would either never be a hot war, involving embargos and economic warfare tied to those embargos/sanctions as China begs Russia and Iran for raw and processed goods, or the war is basically over after all the Chinese aircraft fall out of the sky and American naval vessels sink leaving the Japanese and Indonesians victorious (until the Korean/Vietnamese piracy profession starts back up in the Pacific). As for whether either side COULD stockpile enough munitions for a war, both are pretty damned determined to use Ukraine as an example to cut the fat domestically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece%E2%80%93Japan_relations#Economic_and_trading_relations >One area in which Greece is particularly dynamic is shipping, with a steadily rising volume of orders and ships being constructed in Japanese yards. It is estimated that these orders are worth 2 billion dollars each year. Is it possible to make glorious Nippon a geopolitical diplomatic and military tech development ally?

>>11228 Not while it's under the US hegemony

>>11229 Even if it is under the US hegemony, they must feel Japan is enslaved enough to allow it to rebuild its military. Not that the US has a choice given it needs a country that can at least be a pain in the ass during the initial salvo of missiles in a war against China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGDyS_JJ-MA It keeps tumbling down tumbling down tumbling down...

>>11231 To begin with, why did it need 3 completely different mission packages? ASW and mine sweeping are both about searching and destroying underwater targets, and although there are obvious differences, one would think that there is enough overlap between the equipment used for these two roles to install everything on a single ship. And anti-piracy operations seem to be glorified coast guard patrols with better sensors and more firepower involved, so I again don't see why it needs so much extra equipment that you can't tackle it on top of the other two roles. And the top of the cherry is that they didn't design the ship so that the engines can be simply replaced as part of an overhaul in a drydock. You'd think that in an age where even interim solutions become permanent on a regular basis they'd make it so that you can do this much.

>>11232 >engine replacement Personally I think it's because the MIC just wanted to get congress to buy new ones. Notice how the USN gave up on the LCS and just went and bought the FREMM from Italy as the FFGX replacement in role. Notice how the Russian's built a separately a littoral corvette and a blue water corvette versus the LCS attempt to do both and fail miserably. >mission packages The US armed forces mainly Congress/SCOTUS tend to have some issues with doctrine. The Coastie's Legend class is a good example. Designed and built for blue water counterterror/antipiracy ops, and then SCOTUS just went and said "Nope, you don't have the authority to search towelheads in the Persian gulf" Because apparently that was a Navy job. >ASW That's a traditional corvette/frigate duty >minesweeping Honestly they should just leave the minesweeping to dedicated ships under the USCG (and transfer the CG to the DOD in wartime). who needs the similar type ships with less weapons, they aren't going to survive a full on fight between proper naval combatants nor a Oscar-II P-700 salvo anyways. Plus, one of the jobs of the CG is drug interdiction so it doubles as practice. Think about it, the LCS are way overgeared for the job and what if diversity hires god forbid, hit a mine while doing their proper job, minesweeping? >anti-piracy "Rules of engagement" (Can't just blow them out of the water apparently), and see above jurisdictional issues with SCOTUS.

How does anon feel about sodium engines? The biggest downside to using sodium as a fuel source corrosion aside is that it has less power than hydrocarbons, but sodium is cheap to produce and the byproducts can be used in all sorts of military applications (passive solar-powered electrolysis to turn salt into sodium metal and chlorine gas) meaning the fuel source can be renewed on-board a ship (such as on an aircraft carrier with large runways soaking up sunlight) while producing potable water anyways, and the byproducts of a sodium engine are harmless other than sodium hydroxide vapor (lye), and you can just dump the sodium hydroxide into the ocean to reverse ocean acidification anyways if you don't have more practical applications for it. Since military ships rarely have to operate at top speeds the way mercantile ships do in open oceans and sodium engines become more efficient at scale anyways, the lower power output isn't a big deal, and you can even combine sodium with traditional hydrocarbons in a "double combustion" method without actually changing the engine setup (just the nozzle flow rate which can be controlled with a PLC or remote device) since sodium doesn't react to hydrocarbons allowing you to "clean/flush" the engine of water (sodium reacts with the water vapor produced by burning fuel) as you go/get that speed boost when desirable. I care less about the "renewable" aspect and more about the "being able to produce fuel on-board your own ship" aspect even if it's inefficient compared to refueling. With sodium engines and electrolysis facilities on-board powered by some semi-stable energy source (nuclear, solar, etc.) I feel like larger warships could go years without docking if they had to. Decades if you put greenhouses on board and ran with a skeleton crew. >Never been tried before Some autist over in Czechia is allegedly working on one and is close to getting a working prototype using commercial parts. At the very least he has proof of concept that it can be done.

>>11234 >Dumping lye Strelok, they'll claim it's not friendly and ban it anyways. >Corrosion You "could " use stainless steel, but I think more likely it would be nickel-chromium or bismuth/aluminum bronze based. Metallurgy isn't something I know well.

>>11234 By now we pretty much have nuclear power plants that fit into a shipping container, so I don't really see the point of this. You could argue about costs, but buying more of those micro power plants will make them cheaper due to the economies of scale, so propping up a competitive but ultimately inferior technology seems to be a bad idea. Of course, many normalfags are scared of anything nuclear, but that seems to be slowly changing as the hippies are dying out, so maybe even container ships will be powered by those.

>>11236 Molten salt reactors also use sodium.

>>11236 While I agree that nuclear is better, as it stands nobody likes nuclear and they aren't going to let an oil tanker run on nuclear, let alone are non-nuclear navies to adopt the technology. The only place where nuclear is applicable would be American aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, both of which currently use backup diesel generators (that could be replaced with NaK-Diesel double combustion engines). The application would primarily serve civilian craft, however it does have practical use on both nuclear and non-nuclear military craft.

>>11236 Hmm I dont know why something that can be cranked out by niggers in garage is even an option compared to something which requires trained specialists, stable supply lines, entire industries dedicated to extraction, refinement, enrichement, production, maintanance, transportation and disposal of radioactive materials.

>>11239 >rent a single shipping container on that can fuel and power a ship for years, and if it needs maintenance then the company you are renting it from will just replace it with an other one, therefore there is no downtime >you could even put two of them on a ship, or have a service where they replace it in the middle of the ocean if need to be versus >put a whole extraction plant and an array of solar panels on a ship to produce corrosive fuel during the journey to enhance the performance of the kind of gigantic internal combustion engines that are already in use, and hope that nothing breaks down in the middle of a journey Hmmm, it's like outscoring all the problems with nuclear power plants to a different company that can service multiple cargo companies would make life easier, meanwhile trying to turn every ship into a moving fuel refining facility would require them to have their own crew of specialists who run all that equipment, and in the end they can carry less cargo because all that valuable space is taken up by the sodium producing machinery.

>>11240 You forgot the part where >Violate a dozen international treaties by having the shipping container fuel station on your ship >2/3rds of the ports in the world won't let you dock >If ANYTHING goes wrong you either have to dump a Chernobyl in the ocean (an ecological disaster far worse than any oil spill) or let the ship explode leading to a Chernobyl dump PLUS air particulate >If the ship crashes you get this Chernobyl dump reaction instead of just a bit more powerful explosion >If a terrorist or cartel commandeers the ship they just became an international threat armed with a nuclear device Much like lithium ion batteries, while you can make the reactor smaller that doesn't mean you are making the potential energy of it smaller. Fixed reactors being smaller makes sense because the idea is if it goes critical you can dump the fuel deep underground below groundwater in the granite layer where it shouldn't cause any more problems. If you dump it in the oceans, it will stop a nuclear reaction from taking place due to cooling, but that will take about 18 months to stop being capable of going critical and another 9 years to completely end the reaction taking place inside of it, and it will remain incredibly radioactive for 10,000 years to the point where anyone could turn it into a weapon. That's more than enough time for some cartels to throw together a compression chamber and go look for it anywhere that isn't "death-inducing" pressure depths since the thing will be so dense it'll just sink straight down from the crash site. I love nuclear energy, but sticking it on a ship is fucking retarded. I understand why submarines do it, but submarines do a lot of retarded shit as it were to begin with and there's only a handful of them in the world primarily on secret missions deep underwater. I understand aircraft carriers do it, but that's more of a "fuck around and find out" scenario on their part. Shipping vehicles crewed by pajeets? FUCK no. It's not about their quality as technicians it's about not putting fissile materials in the hands of low-quality technicians. >muh LFTRs They're a meme. They can produce enough power for a bunker or a home, but for the size of reactor you would need for a ship the cost-to-benefit ratios make them worthless. LFTRs have all kinds of problems and there's a reason beyond "can't be used for weapons" that nobody outside of PopSci takes them all that seriously.

Forgive my newfaggotry since these have been probably answered a thousand times but: 1) Should the Musashi and Yamato had survived up to the use of the two A-bombs would the Japs still feel compelled to surrender? 2) If as 1) but the Japs did not want to surrender would the ships be a primary targets for nuking or would they be considered to high risk or to difficult as targets due to their relative mobility? 3) If as 1) but Japan surrendered could they have negotiated better terms of surrender? Could they potentially keep the Battleships on partial disarmament agreements? 4) If Japan won the Pacific War and the 2 BBs had survived could they potentially have as a long active career ahead of them as the USS Iowa had?

>>11242 I will give you an answer for each question to the best of my knowledge. >1) Should the Musashi and Yamato had survived up to the use of the two A-bombs would the Japs still feel compelled to surrender? The Japs still would have ended up surrending even if Musashi had survived Leyte Gulf and Operation Ten-Go never happened. Both battleships would have ended up in the same situation like Nagato and Haruna, sitting in harbor being used as floating AA batteries or getting sunk in shallow water by the various air raids being done by the USN on Kure and the Inland Sea. >2) If as 1) but the Japs did not want to surrender would the ships be a primary targets for nuking or would they be considered to high risk or to difficult as targets due to their relative mobility? The US wouldn't waste a nuke on either ship when they can just send in torpedo planes and get the job done cheaper and with better results than using a nuke. This also lets the US save the few nukes available for use against ground forces and fortified positions (Part of the plan for Operation Olympic was to use nukes to clear out landing areas and the Army was worried if they would have enough nukes ready). >3) If as 1) but Japan surrendered could they have negotiated better terms of surrender? Could they potentially keep the Battleships on partial disarmament agreements? Neither battleship was worth anything as bargaining tools when it comes to the terms of surrender. Yes the USN would have loved to get a chance to study them, but you are not going to learn anything game changing from the Yamatos when the Iowas had better radar, fire controls, secondary guns, and AA guns. I am also sure that if either or both battleships had survived the war they would have been used as targets in Operation Crossroads for the same reasons Nagato and Prinz Eugen were used as targets. >4) If Japan won the Pacific War and the 2 BBs had survived could they potentially have as a long active career ahead of them as the USS Iowa had? I can see them following the Iowa's post WWII career depending on how events play out in this alternate history. However, even in this alternate timeline I still see carriers being the backbone of any navy and battleships would only be used for carrier escort or shore bombardment duty. Still, I wouldn't mind since that means both ships become museum ships that can be visited without the use of a ROV or submersible. Both Yamato and Musashi are great battleships and one of the best battleship designs ever made, but they are not wonderwaffle ships that can solo entire fleets. They had their flaws and they, like all battleships, were superseded by carriers once naval aviation was established and perfected. At some point in the future the battleship concept might be re-introduced if ship mounted rail guns, nano-composite armor, and laser point defense weapons become commonplace, but for now carriers remain the backbone of a navy.

>>11242 Can't speak for the Musashi, but depending on when the Yamato is surviving it would have either been beached at Okinawa turning it into a bloodier battle, or it would have been potentially used in the Guadalcanal campaign to extend the war an additional 6 months and possible force an American peace treaty. Absolute best case scenario it would have secured Japan a more favorable peace/oil treaty but we're talking a slim chance reliant on the ship fucking up American infrastructure. Else it just turns into nuclear scrap down the line.

>>11243 I can't wait for the day aircraft carriers can't flee from the battlefield fast enough and get their just desserts.

>>11243 >the Iowas had better radar, fire controls Was that the reason that allowed Iowa stayed marginally in service till the 90s and Yamato class would be obsolete soon after the war with the popularization of jets or were the gradual modernization costs so minimal compared to the hull that Yamato-classes could have followed a similar career? Also assuming similar technological level of peripheral upgrades as with Iowa was there any innate mainframe reason Yamato would have been obsolete earlier?

>>11246 They weren’t minimal, there were some other reasons. 1) Jarheads wanted larger guns for fire support in case of a naval landing. Still kinda relevant but not after that battery explosion 2) The fact the Soviets built the Kirovs so Iowas were supposed to facefuck each other in a SAG fight (in the unlikely event they actually squared up). Not that it would have mattered since the Soviets would’ve just lobbed the nuclear depth charges for ASW as an oversized arty shell. 3) Dickwaving contest because of the Kirov

Let's say that all 4 Iowas get preserved in such a state that they can be put back to service after only about 6 months, and there are still shells and charges for all the guns. And somehow or an other they get reactivated and transferred to the Ukrainian navy. Could they seriously affect the current war? Yes, it is a stupidly unrealistic scenario for a score of reasons, but let's just handwave all of that away for a bit.

>>11248 Dies to aviation and missiles before it can really do anything. Unless russians fuck up, then it might cause some damage to sevastopols ports first, which ultimately would be just a minor annoyence.

>>11245 It's only a matter of time and target acquisition. There will be a major rethink on doctrine after the first carrier gets dicked by a hypersonic missile. Then it'll be a war of countermeasures until carriers have to devote so much of their arsenal to defense that they become inefficient as a means of attack (like the B-17). We may see high altitude long range drones carrying guided weapons, able to search and destroy a carrier before its aircraft are in launching range. Then it would become a war of attrition with multiple, smaller carriers embarking a few aircraft each being the best way to saturate the enemy's defenses. The nuclear powered supercarrier is likely to go the same way as the Dreadnought; too expensive to risk in combat.

>>11250 Drone carriers could work. You could even have shipping crates work like ammo for flights of suicide drone launchers. It could fit way more drones than planes, since there's no need for a giant cockpit, even if you aren't talking suicide drones, and launching could theoretically go faster since you don't have to cater to meatbag weaknesses like aversion to g-forces. Bonus points to the first country to figure out how to launch an entire flight of drones at full speed. That's of course assuming that a surface navy will find a way to be realistic, which we'll only really see when the big one kicks off. I'm hoping for submarine drone carriers, but reality is gay.

>>11251 >I'm hoping for submarine drone carriers, but reality is gay. Putting big hatches in pressure hulls is unlikely to succeed. I guess a lot of small drones could be launched by adopting the dry launch SLBM method using discarding sabots. Of course such drones would have little chance of disabling a carrier but they could do the search part, leaving the destroy to something more potent. The hardest part would be timing so the sabot falls away at the right moment. Then the drone unfolds it's wings and has to power itself away before the ocean catches it up. Probably best to use four wings because inertia, or have enough power to prop hang while a high aspect ratio wing leisurely unfolds. The propeller would also have to unfold unless we use crazy distributed propulsion with its multiple tiny props. Starting an air breathing engine in the moment before the sea intervenes would be difficult so that means electric propulsion, unless we use one of those gas generator turbine things (like those self-igniting torpedoes which sank the Kursk). The problem with electric power is you have to carry the full mass of the 'fuel' for the whole flight and our drone still has to climb thousands of feet to begin its mission, which would be a one way trip. Probably a short trip as there's a real conflict between the launch method and drone range. Also the sabots would leave a telltale on the surface (unless they can be made to quickly sink which means more mass and complexity) so the sub needs to fuck off quickly if you have to launch within carrier patrol aircraft range. You're right, reality is too gay to have cool things.

>>11252 What if we add one more layer of autism? >big submarine that carries drone submarines >drone submarines carry drones >when it's time to launch one of the drone submarine surfaces and launches a bunch of drones

>>11253 it'd be safer because you could just sling the drone subs to the hull of the manned sub and then the potential danger to the crew is mitigated to a degree. Hell the unmanned subs could even be used as expensive decoys with retaliation potential if the sub gets spotted. It launches drones from below the waves using some sort of vls system and then suicide rams the closest ship.

>>11254 I was thinking more about the lines of a steel sphere with positive buoyancy that has some sort of a drone dispenser and a few valves. Attach it to the sub proper, and then release it when you want to launch drones, so that it floats up, launches them, opens the valves, and sinks back to the bottom, never to be recovered. Although maybe calling them buoys would be more accurate.

Old news, but I suppose Chinese aircraft carriers aren't all they're cracked up to be. I'm aware of reports that "iT's JuSt LiQuId SpIlL" and I don't buy it for a second given the level of tofu construction in everything else China-made.

>>11256 If I have learned anything from dealing with the mainland Chinese, it is that you have to keep a strict eye on them and even then they will fuck up something even if you spell it out for them and give them clear and detailed schematics and plans to follow. I really want a PLA Navy vs USN battle just to see how much of the PLA Navy performs as advertised and how much just crumples like an empty Chinese apartment complex.

>>11257 Well as the Russians have taught the world through the decades: >"Quantity has a quality all it's own." >I really want a PLA Navy vs USN battle just to see how much of the PLA Navy performs as advertised and how much just crumples like an empty Chinese apartment complex. That will be an 'all-in' commitment when it finally comes, as I guess you're well-aware. > pic related, it's you

>>11256 Considering they just convicted and will execute the head of the Chinese Strategic Rocket Forces that’s not a surprise, probably another purge incoming. >carrier Not to defend them by this reminds me of the LCS project cracking the hull and rusting out the engines. At least the burgers get the excuse they were testing brand new composites. I am curious though, is that the one brought from Ukraine (Vayarg) or their first domestic built one? Because I expect that to happen to the former from old age, and I expect the latter to happen because the Chinese never built a carrier before and have never stress tested their “carrier grade steel” Inb4 records got falsified like the that American subsafe steel tester

>>11257 I feel like given the Naval repair reports I've read, the US ships may be just as likely to fall apart unfortunately. >>11259 It was the Fujian which is allegedly their second or third produced carrier from what I'm reading. The Shandong carrier has been reported as having similar issues, but it's totally just a water spill (lol).

https://warshipprojects.com/2023/03/07/development-of-the-nagato-class/ It's nice when a good site that seemed to be dead suddenly posts something.

So Iran is transforming cargo ships into carriers. How retarded is this?

>>11262 If they'd picked ships that weren't already falling apart, then this would be a perfectly reasonable plan.

>>11262 >Muslim Orks Neat.

>>11262 Unless they plan to use F-14 on them could be worse. Most of their planes are F-5 derivatives and are pretty light relatively short take-off planes.

>>11262 Why not? Cheap carriers that can be used as mobile bases for their planes or suicide drones seems a better plan then billion dollar carriers that are too important for national prestige to actually lose.

>>11262 But why? Do they want to project power well outside of their territorial waters?

>>11267 Air missions in Syria.

>>54513 >>54517 >>54519 If I understand correctly, the argument is that it does not matter how well defended a carrier group is if it's offensive capabilities consist of nothing but aircraft and missiles. Once drones with at least rudimentary aerial warfare capabilities are developed (i.e. slap a radar and a few air-to-air missiles to something jet powered) you just have to concentrate those (alongside traditional AA systems) to an area in sufficient numbers, so that sending in the aircraft of the carrier group would be suicidal. At that point the whole thing is reduced into Macross-style missile spam, and you don't even have to fire anything towards the carrier group, just survive until they run out of long-range missiles.

>>11269 The greater the number of drones, the lower the costs of electronic warfare (see Russia). Drones can't cause the kind of damage needed without getting into the price ranges where it would be cheaper to take out a carrier by conventional means.

>>11270 But the point is that you do not have to take out the carrier, just present a great enough danger to its aircraft.

>>11270 Cost effective drones without easily jammable GPS or radar modules may be less effective and accurate, but are the future. They don't have to be the main purpose of taking out a carrier but rather the barrage that wastes a carrier's munitions or blunts its effectiveness. They can be significantly cheaper then the defenses they are facing, such as when Russia uses cheap drones to force Patriot missiles to act.

>>11271 Or destroy its escorts so that using it will pose too great of a risk of losing it to missiles. Chinese claim that they wargamed it and hypersonic missiles manage to sink carriers in 10/10 cases.

>>11273 >Chinese claim that they wargamed it and hypersonic missiles manage to sink carriers in 10/10 cases. Wow! That's better than the hit-rate of the stationary props out innadesert! China sure is great at their keikaku game plans.

>>11273 >>11274 Maybe they mean that if they launch all the available missiles against a single carrier then at least one of them gets through.

>>11275 That statement's language most clearly indicates the Chinese are confident they can take out 10 carrier groups simultaneously, ie, everything the West can conceivably throw at them. And this is certainly in line with the Chinese doctrines on using overwhelming force against a less-capable enemy.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14710168 https://archive.ph/hFzfu >The Defense Ministry appears ready to dig in its heels on purchasing unprecedented missile defense systems that carry an eye-popping price tag of nearly 1 trillion yen ($7.1 billion). >It was forced to consider a sea-based version of the land-based Aegis Ashore missile defense system after the costs were determined to be unacceptable. But initial estimates of the sea-based system came to about double the figure. >The draft blueprint calls for a vessel with a displacement of about 20,000 tons. It would measure 210 meters from stern to bow and have a maximum width of 40 meters.

>>11277 Thats a bit ridiculous. The article is weirdly written, do I understand correctly that the Aegis Ashore is a downgrade from the original proposition ? What system did they want to get originally ? I am a retard when it comes to ships, what type would such a ship be? Frigate ?

>>11278 >the Aegis Ashore is a downgrade from the original proposition ? What system did they want to get originally ? No, the Aegis Ashore is the original proposition. It's basically an ugly building with the radars and command center of the Aegis, and a battery of missiles nearby. The Japs bought two of those, but late had a change of heart and want to put them on a pair of newly built ships.Here is a video that might be more clear: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fL1zcvOptw4 >I am a retard when it comes to ships, what type would such a ship be? Frigate ? I guess it would be a guided missile cruiser, but knowing the Japanese they will call it a destroyer. Every ship is a destroyer if it is operated by them.

What would merchant shipping in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean look like if the mainland Chinese went ahead with military illegitimization of the Legitimate Republic of China, but Kissinger does some child blood sacrifice to magick all the nukes away? Would dual purpose cargo-loitering submarine drones emerge? Would Prigozhin's ghost motivate Putler/Xidup to legitimize marine piracy with government permits for PMCs and sufficiently trustworthy individuals from friendly lands on the African Continent? Could a emotional event involving ammonium nitrate at the Panama canal incentivize Bill Gates to invest in large cargo Airships?

Can our experts weight in on the russian naval lossess? How long do you think the repairs will take? Are they even possible? How would YOU defend against torpedo drones ?

>>11280 I think it would just look like ASEAN losing their shit and becoming a military alliance against China, Laos, and Burma.

>>11281 Kilo looks like a writeoff but my knowledge about ships ends at jacking off to kancolle a few times.

>>11283 Na I'm sure that will buff out.

>>11283 Looks like it made it to a drydock, so it should be fine. WW2 is famous for ships taking beatings, limping back to a safe port, being repaired, and being sent right back. Pic related is the Saratoga that got hit by a torpedo and managed to return on its own. That wasn't the last time it was heavily damaged either and it still survived to the end of the war.

>>11283 The only ship in there not replaceable there is the cruiser, that is because the builder was Mykolaiv Shipyards in Ukraine. A lot of the larger Soviet ships like the carrier were built in the Black Sea shipyard (also Mykolaiv). The Russians haven't shown the ability to build something of that size and supposedly when after the URSS fell the Chinese brought up all the heavy tooling and blueprints. >>11285 >sub >drydock On one hand, it is a sub and they need to take pressure. On the other hand, the Soviet subs are dual hull configurations. Plus the mainbuilder is SEVMASH or admirality in St. Petersberg so they have the repair capability. On the other hand, the cost issue might not be worth it so they could probably just scrap it and use it for parts like what happened with that 688i ran aground.

>>11285 It was at the drydock in the first place, thats why it got hit. Same for the Ropucha. >>11286 I heard that there is an uncompleted hull of slava class in that shipyard from the end of soviet era, If russians capture it they could refubrish it quickly.

>>11286 >The only ship in there not replaceable there is the cruiser >The Russians haven't shown the ability to build something of that size and supposedly when after the URSS fell the Chinese brought up all the heavy tooling and blueprints. They certainly retained the capability to float hulls that size and been minting 250m long oil tankers in recent years plus a few slightly smaller ice breakers from the Baltic shipyards. >Plus the mainbuilder is SEVMASH or admirality in St. Petersberg so they have the repair capability. Can they get it through the interior route? I know there is "a" pathway (Don/Volga/White Sea/Onega/Ladoga/Neva) without the Bosporus Straight, the Volga-Onega might be questionable for ships this size seems kinda long too. and undoubtedly frozen in winter >>11287 >I heard that there is an uncompleted hull of slava class in that shipyard from the end of soviet era The Moskva was recently refurbished/modernized (again) but still half-assedly it seems as it wasn't all that modern.. I think Russia has the the opposite problem - they they got the tin cans but nothing worthwhile to put in them. Also seems like there's less and less appetite for larger vessels in general and especially in the black sea, the guided missile cruisers were supposed to oppose aircraft carriers - not many of those floating there. Just imagine US donating one to Kiev, kek But otherwise it's a nice juicy target sitting in the open sea.

>>11288 >route Volga-don canal and then White-Baltic sea canal. Might as well just stop in St. Petes since Admirality can build 636 and 877s anyways. Assuming it could sail on its own, otherwise it would be deck cargo. Since its a 636.6 (Kilo improved II) they might take some parts from an older one and slap them on or retrofit to older 636 the new equipment. As to why no more cruisers, 4 reasons: 1) Slavas to the Kirov what the T-90 is to the T-80. Cheaper and designed to facefuck a SAG or a CTF group. They've still got a enough of both for a flagship for each fleet. Not really a thing these days since the VMF two primary goals are to deny territorial waters to enemies and protect the SSBN fleet until nukes are launched. 2) The soviets build destroyers and cruisers in alternating roles rach generation. Udaloy was the ASW role wheras Sovremenny was the AA net and facefuck a SAG role for destroyers. One has a modified TOR AA, other has a proper BUK system for longer range engagements. Supposedly, the Lider class if built will be both a destroyer and a scaled up cruiser that can do all three (lmao F-35 moment), but as far as I'm concerned thats just Severnoye trying to get thr MOD to give monies for Lider and the Gorshikov instead of just one. 3)Majority of "how to ruin NATO" or China's day" is in the Northetn or Pacific fleets. Baltic and Black sea for the VMF are defensive postures since both are inland seas. Subs are thr primary threat to NATO combined with a fleet in being and minor force projection capabilities. 4) Current trend is smaller vessels since missles CY naval AA seems to be function of radar coverage, avalible missles, and CIWS for the rnjesus component. Also easier to combat ASW threats with heloes and ships vs planes.

>>11289 >White-Baltic sea canal. I mixed up the White Lake with the White Sea which is to the north. I meant the Volga-Baltic waterway which connects Onega and Volga river.

>>11279 Aegis Ass-shore sounds retarded as a concept. The whole point of Aegis networks is decentralization and mobility. That shit is shitting duck for the cheapest near-peers artillery barrages.

>>11292 If your theater AA is taking artillery fire, you've already lost.

>>11293 Oceans are by thumb rule big. Also vast majority of countries usually need their defences against immediately neighbouring countries and do not have the convenience of their peers having to march through the world's 2nd largest country, even if having to step on fucking leaves is the only resistance the adversary meets still the cold and the distance leaves you enough preparation geopolitically traditional countries subject to actual war do not have.

>>11294 In their entire (short) existence Americans have never been even slightly threatened, so good luck trying to convince one why would a foreign military choose to do things differently. Reminder that the best army of the world still uses outdated SPGs without autoloaders and their AA network would be completely destroyed within 12 hours if they didn't have the largest ocean of planet Earth between them and the nearest "enemy".

>>11294 >>11295 I was going to write a long post about how any sane commander would keep his SAMs as far from the front as possible, before I remembered that Aegis Ashore isn't even an AA system. It's actually a ballistic missile defense system, which makes >>11292 even more retarded. If you're using conventional forces to attack something valuable enough to warrant a BMDS, then either you want to capture it intact, you've already tried nuking it, or you never had any nukes to begin with.

>>57138 Testing, sorry /k/, newfag trying to figure out how to qoute from a different topic.

What's the likelihood of capital ship mutinies happening amid the current great powers' navies in the event of World War Taiwan?

>>11296 >It's actually a ballistic missile defense system Unless you need it for deep continental defence (which I doubt given the ASHORE part) the point still stands, there still is no fucking reason to make it stationary. No amount of firepower is going to save it from conventional saturation ballistics which could be avoided and which would not even occur if the platform had even rudimentary mobility.

>ahoi sailor >>11298 I dont think they will survive long enough for this to be possible. Drones are like perfect torpedoes and planes. Couple it with 100% satelite coverage and other methods of survailance and there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, and nothing to defend.

>>11300 >Drones are like perfect torpedoes and planes. That depends on where the mutinous ship is, I have my doubts on the drone attacks by Hohols on ships in a port geographically close to enemy land and manned by the least funded and respected part of the Russian military would work as well in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. Submarines may provide a way to launch small-scale pinpoint attacks to cripple the radar of a mutinous blue-water warship there, but from what I've read the tube-launched drones currently in use have the sole purpose of reconnaissance. >Couple it with 100% satelite coverage and other methods of survailance and there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, and nothing to defend. But what if the mutineers know this and are ethno-religiously diverse? A single AEGIS guided missile destroyer rebelling against its transniggerkike masters followed by a sudden delivery of PGMs to any boat unlucky enough to traverse the Suez/Panama canal/port of Haifa at that moment would be extremely kino.

>>11299 >deep ballistic defense TBH I think the US just didn't want to sell THAAD to the Japanese or maybe its a plan in case they want to set the stage for further Ageis integration.

>>11302 Elaborate please?

>>11299 And it seems like the Japanese come to a similar conclusion, hence the plan to build some ships for these systems. But it makes me wonder how this situation came to be exactly, but I guess it was one of these: >the civilian leadership foisted them on the navy Maritime Self-Defense Force™, who are now trying to salvage the situation >an admiral thought it would be a good idea, then an other admiral found them to be useless if they are immobile >the situation genuinely changed so much since they first ordered them that they have to adapt them to the new reality now

Would it make sense to armor up destroyers?

>>57780 Is this some AI shit? Sounds too dumb to have come from a real person.

>>11306 Stupidity is posting it in the wrong thread Foolishness is dismissing a man as a fool

>>11305 Armor against which threats? Direct hit with an anti-ship missile? Not going to be enough, so no point. Stray fragments of hypersonic projectiles intercepted a bit too close? Maybe, it depends. Less powerful weapons of speedboat swarms? Shelling from MLRS and artillery of modest calibers or light loitering munitions? Yes, if they are expected to go anywhere in reach of hostile shores, ever.

>>11308 >Armor against which threats? I guess post treaty era, since I doubt any sort of reliable protection is possible in current era. Intended as convoy escort since you need to trade something to fit that extra armor so it will not be too fast or too well armed, I guess. So like, enough to survive getting hit with 5 inch shells?

Where's my light submarine class called Jellyfish?

>>11310 How come that the bongs never named 4 ships of the same class after Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Middlesex?

>>58718 And also a sad example of having multiple tabs open and posting in the wrong thread.

bump

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/battleship-comeback-how-us-navy-could-bring-back-big-guns-46672 https://archive.ph/pewVI >In laying the groundwork for battleship modernizations, there four things that must happen for any successful update. The Iowa-class battleships were designed in the late 1930s, and a lot has happened in the last eighty years. First, the ships must be highly automated. The ships originally sailed with crews of up to 2,700 personnel, later reduced to 1,800. The U.S. Navy is no longer a draftee service, and personnel costs in the all-volunteer Navy are major expenses. Prime candidates for automation are older mechanical systems, such as the three sixteen-inch gun turrets, each of which has a crew of over a hundred, and the power plant and engineering. >Second, the battleships would return to the field just as firepower is transitioning from being gunpowder-based to electricity-based. The ship will need all the power it can get to power the new generation of weapons systems that will go onboard. A nuclear power plant would provide power in the megawatts range, while requiring fewer crew to operate it. An alternative is the electric drive system that powers the Zumwalt class, albeit on a larger scale, delivering even greater power. >Third, the battleships need to be able to sink ships at ranges of at least two hundred miles and hit land targets at eight hundred to a thousand miles. At 887 feet long, the battlewagons will be prime targets for land- and sea-based antiship missiles and must have a reasonable chance of operating from beyond their ranges. While the effective range of antiship missiles will only continue to grow, a long-distance striking capability will still be useful against other targets, including island garrisons, air bases and enemy ships. >Fourth, the battleships will be purely offensive weapons designed to attack targets on land and at sea. They will not have advanced radar systems aboard, nor will they equip the Standard family of missiles, nor will they jump on the ballistic-missile defense bandwagon. In order to justify their existence, they must be able to contribute as much offensive firepower as possible. And it goes on and on. The article is from 2019, but what is shocking is that it was not posted at the first of April.

>>11314 >"Eat Lead!", replied the fat accepting Microsoft bing-powered magnetic railguns.

>>11315 But lead is not magnetic..

>>11314 The parts about needing railguns with transcontinental ranges might be dumb, but the first and fourth points are perfectly valid. The manpower shortage is a very real and serious problem, and trying to make a ship that can do every job at once is how we ended up with the Zumwalts.

>>11316 You're not going to let your bing powered AI a bit of poetic license?

>>11314 There is so much wrong with that article, but even by 2019 I wasn't expecting any better than NI. Those 'advanced radar systems' they disparage as mission creep are used to perform gunfire control. AEGIS is a weapons control system, it actually at one point had a profile for the 16in guns. Of course, there was this gem: >The aft sixteen-inch gun turret has to go How to cause the ship to literally snap in half.

New pics of iranian carrier. I guess they will remove superstructure last. Unless it is some sort of drone carier.

>>11314 At this point you would probably need to replace engines, which would mean removing pretty much everything and putting it back in. It would be easier to make a new one.

How viable would it be to use old polyester hulled minesweeper vessels to patrol a certain sea crossing for rubber dinghies, extract their highly enterprising if reluctant crews for processings, and then put them all on an immediate shuttle back to their home countries of origin? Just asking for scientific reasoning and such

>>11321 If you're talking about the four Iowas specifically, between 1996 and 2008 BAE actually made upgrade kits for them to modernize and automate their boiler-turbines, bringing them nearly in line with modern manning standards while also extending their service lives by another 20-30 years. This all with very detailed plans on how they would do these rebuilds inside the ships using already existing hatches and not have to cut any holes in the decks. The obsolete boiler-turbines are ironically not a large problem for the Iowas. You are correct overall that it would be better to just build new, though.

>build submarine drone >drone seeks civilian cargo ships of an enemy nation >follows and attaches itself to cargo ship past sundown >missile launcher robot/crane with magnets climbs up the ship's hull a bit so any missiles it launches will show up as having a surface origin on any nearby warship's sensors >fires missile at IDF/NATO assets, then gets off >drone destroys itself by sinking to crush depth >m-muh Iranian Q-Ships, oy gevalt ids anudda shoah!!! Retarded, possible or already been done?

>>11324 You over-complicate things. There's no need to have the drone spiderman its way up the side of the ship, just pick a container ship to be your dummy and position the drone to radar mask itself from your unwitting USS Liberty stand-in using the container ship. Position the drone within the resolution limit of the target ship's radar when it surfaces/fires, and the targeted ship won't be able to tell the difference between the drone and the container ship, so you could even have the missiles fired out the bow of the drone like torpedoes. Thanks to Russia/China using palletized missile launchers that are disguised as shipping containers, the gloves have come off in that regard and now everyone has them. So, if the drone isn't caught the target ship's nation would 'be forced' to assume it came from the container ship since all relevant data from the targeted ship would indicate it 'probably' came from the container ship. Obviously, the container ship would be innocent and any thorough investigation would reveal that, but that would take a long time to work out. Not really a factor if you're trying to false flag.

>>11323 Considering that steam is still widely used, it sounds like those upgrade packs would have been mostly off-the-shelf components. My gut feeling is that they would have used the same systems that are in place on nuclear vessels, not because those are inherently better than what are used for e.g. district heating, but simply because they can bill the government for more money that way.

With F-35B's VTOL. every ship with a helicopter pad house the best jet ever.

>>11327 launching planes is not a problem, the problem is maintaining them, and it is quite a needy plane. Landing too is generally a problem. And dont forget that brits needed to reinforce the deck of their aircraft carriers specifically so that f-35 does not melt the deck. In any case, the ability to launch planes is most likely inferior to holding its weight in missiles.

Naval-based jet fighters are the best.

>>11328 That wasn't just a Brit issue, even the US had to do that; that was a multi-billion dollar affair. In any case, the primary value of a ship-borne fixed-wing aircraft on any ship less than a CVL is in reconnaissance; probably the only thing on the F-35 that has 'worked' since the start (within historical military expectations of new-tech reliability) is the sensor package. But you are correct, the maintenance would be the primary problem. In order to make one work on a surface combatant, you'd be talking a ship that is at minimum an Aviation Cruiser like some kind of a modernized Tone-class.

>>11329 Props are great too. Tell me pic related does not fill your heart with many mixed emotions.

Can a Gripen to made to land on aircraft carriers? >>11331 It's beautiful...

What kind of shenanigans could be permitted in the construction of an aircraft carrier with an 80-90% unmanned aircraft complement? Some kind of rail+box system for aircraft storage management with a small hangar for individual craft maintenance by human crew, theoretically improving fire safety and DC+armor schemes compared to conventional designs with large central hangars ripe for BBQ in the event of an AShM penetration?

>>11333 Practically speaking, there'd be no major differences between UAV carriers and conventional CVs. UAVs take up just about the same footprint as conventional aircraft do, both for storage and maintenance, while gaining nothing much in terms of weight; so, your physical requirements between the platforms are virtually identical. On your specific idea of individual aircraft storage, speaking purely from memory here (meaning I could be wrong): that has actually been considered by the Brits and Americans, but was soundly rejected. Speaking from a purely technical standpoint now: Firstly, it would greatly exacerbate the already laborious process of maintaining the air wing. The amount of work that a single maintenance team could do would be greatly limited. To be clear, I believe it would be plausible for low numbers of aircraft (based on very loose napkin math, up to 5 ought to be 'within human limits'), but any more than that and your space-limited maintenance crew would not be able to keep up. In order then to have enough maintenance throughput to actually keep the aircraft operational, you'd have to duplicate the entire hangar/maintenance system. Furthermore, said system would not be small by any means, and it would be extremely heavy for the number of aircraft it held. For a simple comparison, if my figures are even within the correct ballpark, a CV the size (and displacement) of a Ford-class with this system would only be able to carry ~35-40 full sized aircraft when at maximum capacity- in other words less than half. Secondly, and what would really be the most damning, is it would actually jeopardize the ship's damage control ability and even general seaworthiness. While there would be some degree of fire and blast protection, as stated the system wouldn't even remotely be light (it'd be much heavier than the old British twin-hangar deck system) and by necessity of design (it cannot take up the same room as the powerplant) it would all have to be located very high up on the ship's hull. This would drag the metacenter of gravity of the ship well, well above the water line, which in turn would make storms matters of life and death for the ship, with any form of damage below the waterline resulting in a near instantaneous capsizing. Again, plausible for very low numbers of aircraft (such as helicopters or limited recon aircraft on a surface warfare ship, essentially a modernized floatplane doctrine), but for anything more than that it'd be beyond impractical unless you got into CVBB (Ultra-Carrier) territory and only wanted to carry the same number of aircraft as a Supercarrier.

>>11334 >(such as helicopters or limited recon aircraft on a surface warfare ship, essentially a modernized floatplane doctrine) Could ~3 armored storage comparments each carrying 1-2 supersonic fighter-reconnaissance drones make sense in a Battlecruiser or Battleship, especially if you've got Lockheeb levels of money to spend on a pad capable of surviving STOVL landings or a vertical launch bay? Sure such a ship's escorts would handle the bulk of aerial reconnaissance but it can never hurt to have some additional reserves especially if Sats get Kessler'd.

>>11335 There's no particular reason why you couldn't have that if you were talking a missile ship, but really, since the system would already be heavily compartmentalized there'd be no actual reason to have more than 1 of the systems with 3-5 'slots'. You do, however, need to seriously consider the concept of operations for the aircraft. If you're wanting them to operate without the assistance of satellite coverage, you must realize that they have to be tethered either to a friendly manned aircraft (eg: the loyal wingman program the USAF is trying for) or to their launching ship itself. In the latter case, this would severely limit the range at which the aircraft could operate (especially in an ECM environment). As a result, your UAV would be mostly limited to being an airborne early warning platform, which is a highly necessary role anyway, so you may as well just specialize the aircraft for the role in the first place and have it only operate within the air defense sphere of its operating ship. A VTOL E-2 Hawkeye, essentially. This would to some degree actually remove the need for the ship to operate with a CV as it could handle its own reconnaissance.

>>11336 >sat-less operation >loyal wingman In that case slaving the UAVs to a manned C&C craft from an escort or the ship itself makes obvious sense, though with recent advances in >muh AI I wonder if old timey navigation might at one point be possible at a reasonable accuracy without a constant radio tether to a mothership or command craft, especially for passive reconnaissance. Furthermore is it unreasonable to produce small-ish reconnaissance craft focused on all-angle IRST to complement conventional Radar AWAC? For extra paranoia could such UAVs and their motherships/command craft use a combination of lasers and Infrared signal lights for basic low-bandwidth datalinking?

Speaking of drones,I have a strong suspicion that with the powers of modern technology a drone based on the Lerche could work, and I can see it being useful on a ship. Granted, it would be only a turboprop, but that might be even better if you just want a group flying sensor suites that buzz around a ship. And you could even operate them from a helicopter hangar.

>>11337 >especially for passive reconnaissance. Passive Reconnaissance by drone is performed by flying the drone over the target autonomously and then having it fly all the way back to friendly airspace (also autonomously) where it can radio back the information. The time delay is usually measured in hours if not longer. For this reason, Passive Reconnaissance limited to force estimation. It is virtually useless as a native capability for any major surface combatant. Active Reconnaissance is actually seeking out the enemy to acquire location data, and this is what could actually be used to generate shooting solutions. That is the only reason a major surface combatant would need a native reconnaissance aircraft. >Furthermore is it unreasonable to produce small-ish reconnaissance craft focused on all-angle IRST to complement conventional Radar AWAC? That is unironically more or less what the USN decided to use the F-35C for, so the idea have been proven as theoretically possible and someone is actually trying it. >For extra paranoia could such UAVs and their motherships/command craft use a combination of lasers and Infrared signal lights for basic low-bandwidth datalinking? In theory, yes.

>>11339 >Passive recon It could serve some purpose for photographing static or semi-static targets over land/coastlines such as Chinese beach fortifications the night before a naval landing provided the absence of satellites hasn't completely removed long-range Artillery or Missile fire support from the equation. >time delay Why not have the reconnaissance aircraft fire an expendable courier vehicle/missile containing a targeting solution back towards the fleet upon locating the enemy? Minutes should still be preferable to hours. Maybe space was a mistake, Satellite-free modern surface warfare is kind of fun to think about.

>>11340 >Passive recon In theory, that is the single use case that passive reconnaissance would become of some value (even if limited). However, if your order of battle has collapsed to the point you're using a battleship/cruiser for passive reconnaissance you're doing a lot of other things wrong. You'd be much better off using a hyper-sonic SR-72-esque spy plane for that. >missile the data back You just told everyone where your fleet is and exactly what it is you're doing, so you completely lose any shred of the element of surprise you may have had. Also, that's absurdly expensive. In order to get the data back to the fleet in an actionable time frame, you're talking about a hyper-sonic missile with a micro-satellite payload. In other words, about $3 million per shot, and that's just for data. Also, since you specified that the missile contains the targeting solution, you've now put your entire FCS in the aircraft. Why would you do that?

>>11341 >price The Federal Reserve can just print more, it's fine :^) >However, if your order of battle has collapsed to the point you're using a battleship/cruiser for passive reconnaissance you're doing a lot of other things wrong. >You'd be much better off using a hyper-sonic SR-72-esque spy plane for that. That scenario was envisioned for a world where Kessler happened and the US lost nearly all of its foreign military bases save for its "old guard" of heavily industrialized vassals (European NATO, Japan, ANZAC) and is now trying to engage in politics by other means in the Asian theatre, here Sats have been partially replaced by Stratospheric Airships but there's a demilitarized high altitude no-fly-zone in the Area of operations where the detection of an SR-72 would immediately put the enemy on high alert and generate an international incident. The US wants to engage in gunboat diplomacy/Vietnam-style false flagging/restore the unipolar world order through proven means but with the element of surprise, so the Admiral in charge of the BG patrolling the southern Pacific in support of to neutrally observe a US-funded anti-BRICs Asian spring in the Solomon islands decided to use one of his ship's stealth reconnaissance drones at low altitude to gather information to support the rebels in their upcoming landing at the Bay of Ants, fully prepared to put the blame on Australia should be the plane be discovered. >You just told everyone where your fleet is and exactly what it is you're doing, so you completely lose any shred of the element of surprise you may have had. >Also, since you specified that the missile contains the targeting solution, you've now put your entire FCS in the aircraft. Why would you do that? The idea behind the missile courier is to generate a targeting solution that is still "fresh" enough to let a hypothetical super-Iowa at ~1200nmi provide data to its onboard FCS+16inch shells along with nearby DDGs' AShMs so they can at least guide themselves roughly to where the enemy should be instead of running blind or on data that is hours out of date. The other option would be a radio relay picket line of aircraft and ships, but that would make the fleet even more visible than a single missile would. Maybe a compromise would be to aim the missile not at the home fleet directly but rather at another plane equipped with its own courier missile, Raytheon sure wouldn't mind.

I was gonna put a big rant here because this thread is dumb, but instead I'll say this: Once you have reclaimed the basic semblence of a Navy back from the degenerate brass office who's been siphoning money off to bring in drugs, sex traffickers and the foreign born, then it isn't the coast or the sea defenses that you're gonna need to worry about. Those seamen you employ should conduct their work in-land. Since they are (or should be) the "strong young men" class from within your society, they should be spending their economic "graph goes up" productivity on shoring up the foreign criminals and traitors and sending them homeward and spend every minute of their shifts making sure that the boats sending them homeward are completely full. If they also manage to get some productivity in, such as raising a family or producing a useful product then that's great. But I want them arranged and prepared to come deep inland and to carry out extreme efficiency for their work there. That's how you defend a country at least morally and carefully. The quadcopters and the laserbeam railguns are just going to be clumsy and easily mitigated. I will get over having fewer living men and a cleverer weaponry only when I see that the results can no longer be denied. I wouldn't shape any of the armed forces around the assumption otherwise. I just want to see living breathing men and simple guns that are proven.

>>11342 I'm sorry, that is so far out there in the realms of impossibility that you're talking pure fiction. Any circumstance where military satellites have been knowingly/intentionally downed, the gloves will come off and literally no military power is going to give a flying fuck about treaties. The SR-72 would be less likely to be detected than your UAV and especially that return missile. >but that would make the fleet even more visible than a single missile would. Unironically, no it wouldn't. You seem to have absolutely no idea how much tail signature a missile gives off. Just get rid of the missile, it's not helping you. At all. >>11343 Bud, you've completely misunderstood this thread. Also, nobody wants to hear that navies and coastal defenses are stupid from one of the few flags that could have vastly improved their lot in the world by using a navy and coast defense to sink the damn migrant ships.

>>11344 >Any circumstance where military satellites have been knowingly/intentionally downed, What about due to an accident? Maybe the US goes all in on a big ring habitat and then the Russians follow suit with one of their own but good old Soviet engineering and cost cutting causes it to shatter to all shit and in the process of spalling, takes out the American space station and then everything's completely fucked for decades. >>11342 We're kind of getting into less Naval thread territory and more Alt History thread instead.

>>11345 >What about due to an accident? That's one of those things that would be impossible to distinguish between an honest accident and an engineered 'accident'. Any military thinker worth their salt would realize the other military thinkers are thinking this was probably intentional, and in short accident or not the nukes would fly. Even if everyone actually did know it was an accident, chaos theory dictates that if one person pushes the button the only way for other powers to not lose (for absolutely nothing) is for themselves to also push the button, and nobody would be willing to bet that EVERY other guy wouldn't push the button, so everyone will push the button. This is more or less how MAD worked.

>>11346 How well would ICBMs work in a dense enough Kessler scenario?

>>11347 Very few ICBMs actually reach the heights required to be jeopardized by space debris and almost all ICBMs have INS/Tercom fallbacks that are good for <1km accuracy even if GPS goes down forever. In short, a Kessler scenario wouldn't really affect the first strike power of an ICBM.

>>11344 The thread's purpose seems to be to talk gun porn. That's alright. It being a bit of a larp or alt-history escapism - that's still alright. But you have hundreds of posts on the complexities of the big floating guns and their ability to work across oceans... When do you mention upgrading or improving the men? Or the capability of the men? Or the boats and infrastructure for the job you really need them to do (which is to venture deeply inward to strip the rot out)? Consider the issues you may think are specific or unique only to bong flags and toward their problems: we could have patrol vessels with men employed aboard ready prepared to drag boats back to wherever they came from whether the ports of the receiving country are welcoming or not and that would stop traffickers dead since they're opportunist invaders mainly and the opportunities would subsequently dry up. ThIngs like that still wouldn't affect defense of the country. The rot is now within and you need to turn at once inland, primarily with transport but possibly even with guns in order to get these "effectively" civil war combatants back out again. America, particularly the Confederate south as it happens has a similar problem, people being imported illegally most of whom hate the country and who carry nefarious ambitions on their arrival, except that your land area is bigger and the invaders more readily armed. Consider it. Consider the tech needed, and the sense of the scale required, and how pointless it is to focus on the guns when the limit to your Navy doing *anything* at this point is men willing to file in through recruitment and further to that end men who're fit enough to round up angry Arabs/Mexicans. If you want to entertain Navy hypotheticals then I'm trying to provoke you to dig at this one, because it's near and dear to this flag post, sure, but because I hope while being something of a technophobe luddite that the anons will come up with something interesting or that the fruit of understanding will be in some way sweet by it. How will your UAV and your drone carriers help those of us of the post-bongistan flag?

>>11349 Strelok, we are not as stupid as you seem to think we are, but we're also not as intelligent/capable as you appear to hope us to be. Of course we know the seat of purpose is on land, of course we know that any piece of equipment is only as good as its operator; and we're painfully aware of the decline of society and the rot that permeates deep within our respective cultures. There's absolutely nothing we can do about that, especially not here. Navies have no place in the reclaiming of civilization, technology will not and cannot mitigate the decay of society (as a matter of fact, a reliance on technology does the exact opposite). You only care about the societal rot. That's fine, but it's outside this thread's lane, you can make a new thread on it. The tengu will probably delete it, because that's what the tengu does. Regardless, there is absolutely nothing that a navy can do to reclaim civilization, but that's still not what this thread is for. This thread is for the curious asking what once was and for the dreamers who ask what could have been. This thread is for the people who woke up one morning and realized the world up and left them behind, that their wheelhouse now either rests at the bottom of the ocean or had been turned into razorblades. This thread is for those that pine for a world they never knew, or have been denied from knowing. But isn't that 90% of /k/?

Does Korean have a good navy?

>>11351 They have some of the best ships in terms of quality, but they don't have enough of them to really have an impact in anything outside their own immediate waters.

>>11352 Does the Korean People's Navy have any purpose beyond mining and gayops in the event of an inner-Korean escalation? They have SLBMs and cruise missiles on subs but their larger assets seem too old and small in number to have much of an impact unless the Artillery alpha strike at the 38th parallel somehow cripples South Korean air defense.

>>11353 I'm actually not that familiar with North Korea's navy beyond hearsay, unfortunately. From that limited perspective, however, I'd wager a guess their navy is primarily a show piece meant for internal consumption propaganda. Three quarters of their navy barely floats, for one thing.

>>11329 I still stand by my statement.

>>11355 Your 1st example was better. Larger fighters become to cumbersome to be effective in air combat when additional weight is added for shipborne capacity. IMO the Rhino is already too large to be appropriate as a carrierborne platform. Still the ASF-14 would be a better choice than the lighter F-18E solely because it by far outperfomed the later in all aspects

>>11338 What would be advantages of such a thing over helicopters?

>>11357 It would just need a simple turboprop engine and a propeller instead of all the things and stuff that goes into making a helicopter work, and yet it could still lands just like one. In fact, it might need an overall less footprint. And it would be an aircraft that can go fast. Of course, it wouldn't be a 1:1 replacement for a helicopter, because you could use it to drops e.g. sonars, but using it to collect them would be quite a bit more complicated. And it couldn't carry people, which also limits how useful it is. But you could have a hangar with a helicopter or two, and also park a few of these drones next to them, and then use whichever is appropriate.