Mod comments regarding closing the thread Super Battleship Proposal

assymmetric

New Member
This is a bit of a complaint. My thread, Super Battleship Proposal, was closed by Bonza. I am not so much complaining that the thread was closed, because if the mods don't like the thread then who am I to argue, and we can't entertain every idea that somebody throws out there.

What I am complaining about is what I feel is a bit insulting remarks that the mod made when closing my thread, basically saying that the idea was without any merit but not saying why.

Every new technology, from the airplane, to the submarine seems far fetched. Can I assume that it was because the battleship cost too much? The war on Iraq cost 3 trillion dollars estimated. I think we could afford a 1 million ton battleship. A 100k ton carrier only costs 8 billion by comparison.

Was it that the guns were too large? I researched and found that 31 inch guns, and a 700,000 ton battleship, was briefly considered by Germany (above and beyond the Z plan). Was it that it would be armed with rail guns and lasers? These weapons are planned.

In summary, I don't appreciate that I had an idea for a weapon system that was completely possible, and being told it was science fiction. It could be built, as far as I know, and could be afforded. If you don't like the thread, I can understand closing it, but it is a bit insulting to me to dismiss me so rudely and my idea when closing the thread.

I think it is only logical that such a ship would be very effective along side a super carrier, in the future, as a platform that generates sufficient electricity to power rail guns, that could bombard a country for cheap, and use lasers to counter incoming missiles. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can build a large ship.

Anyhow, I was very dissapointed to be treated this way by the mod involved and so many members.

I am attaching the mod comments below for reference, so you can see why I think it is rude. Nobody deserves to be treated this way for doing nothing more than sharing an idea:

Alright, the thread is done. I made a request for some thoughtfulness and realism, if that's going to be ignored for the sake of fantasy then it isn't a topic for this forum. You might want to consider that in any future posts you care to make. If you want to talk about this stuff that's your choice - but it doesn't have a place on a forum concerned with realistic military topics.
 

the road runner

Active Member
What I am complaining about is what I feel is a bit insulting remarks that the mod made when closing my thread, basically saying that the idea was without any merit but not saying why.
Im sure the reason is that a 1 million tonne battleship would cost just alone in steel 1,000,000(ship weight) X $1,500(per ton of steel) = a lot of money just in steel

Add to that the cost of labour to build it probably double the cost of the steel.

Add to that the technology costs for R and D for weapons,engines ect.

Add the cost of Manning and training of crews/engineers ect id assume 50,000(plus) people

Also realise you would need 3 ships ,to have just one available ,while 1 was in maintenance and one is in training/working up the crews.

So the cost alone would be what 5 odd trillion dollars?

Then add the cost of maintaining the ships.


In summary, I don't appreciate that I had an idea for a weapon system that was completely possible, and being told it was science fiction. It could be built, as far as I know, and could be afforded. If you don't like the thread, I can understand closing it, but it is a bit insulting to me to dismiss me so rudely and my idea when closing the thread.
The Mods here have to put up with people who come here with pipe dreams or ideas that they think are so viable every week.I would assume if you did something for a living were you were being paid for your professional advice and a punter came into your workspace spouting off ideas that were so far fetched you would take he time to explain it to them step by step?

I think it is only logical that such a ship would be very effective along side a super carrier, in the future, as a platform that generates sufficient electricity to power rail guns, that could bombard a country for cheap, and use lasers to counter incoming missiles. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can build a large ship.
Sorry mate but you are dreaming and bordering on being a Fanboy

My first point will hopefully change your mind of a cheap ship?

Anyhow, I was very dissapointed to be treated this way by the mod involved and so many members.

I am attaching the mod comments below for reference, so you can see why I think it is rude. Nobody deserves to be treated this way for doing nothing more than sharing an idea:
Maybe you should read a few more posts and realise how lucky we are to have defence professionals share there time with us ,explaining fact from fiction?

"Alright, the thread is done. I made a request for some thoughtfulness and realism, if that's going to be ignored for the sake of fantasy then it isn't a topic for this forum. You might want to consider that in any future posts you care to make. If you want to talk about this stuff that's your choice - but it doesn't have a place on a forum concerned with realistic military topics."

If you stick around this forum you might realise that the Defence Pros,like the content of this forum to be right and factual.Its the reason i stay here because "right is right" and thats what the defence members expect.

Im not having a go at you, just trying to explain that Facts are moulded by the opinion of professionals.Stick around you will see what i mean if you take the time to read their well thought out posts.

Regards
 

assymmetric

New Member
  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #3
Im sure the reason is that a 1 million tonne battleship would cost just alone in steel 1,000,000(ship weight) X $1,500(per ton of steel) = a lot of money just in steel

Add to that the cost of labour to build it probably double the cost of the steel.

Add to that the technology costs for R and D for weapons,engines ect.

Add the cost of Manning and training of crews/engineers ect id assume 50,000(plus) people

Also realise you would need 3 ships ,to have just one available ,while 1 was in maintenance and one is in training/working up the crews.

So the cost alone would be what 50 odd trillion dollars?

Then add the cost of maintaining the ships.




The Mods here have to put up with people who come here with pipe dreams or ideas that they think are so viable every week.I would assume if you did something for a living were you were being paid for your professional advice and a punter came into your workspace spouting off ideas that were so far fetched you would take he time to explain it to them step by step?





Maybe you should read a few more posts and realise how lucky we are to have defence professionals share there time with us ,explaining fact from fiction?

"Alright, the thread is done. I made a request for some thoughtfulness and realism, if that's going to be ignored for the sake of fantasy then it isn't a topic for this forum. You might want to consider that in any future posts you care to make. If you want to talk about this stuff that's your choice - but it doesn't have a place on a forum concerned with realistic military topics."

If you stick around this forum you might realise that the Defence Pros,like the content of this forum to be right and factual.Its the reason i stay here because "right is right" and thats what the defence members expect.

Im not having a go at you, just trying to explain that Facts are moulded by the opinion of professionals.Stick around you will see what i mean if you take the time to read their well thought out posts.

Regards
Thank you Road Runner.
 

Bonza

Super Moderator
Staff member
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my original post in the thread... when I asked for some more thought and realism, I intended to convey that you go and have a look around for information on why such a ship might not be feasible. Do some research and that kind of thing. Off the top of my head, here are some issues with the idea:

- The size is such that it makes construction, replenishment, maintenance, crewing, navigation and evasion of enemy attack all extremely impractical. That's leaving out cost, which I think would probably be the least worrying of all of those. These are very serious issues which must be considered, and to address them I think you have to look at contemporary ship designs, relative tonnage, how docking such a large ship would work, what sealanes a warship could reasonably be expected to traverse in its service, what the draft of the ship would be and thus what harbours it could enter practically, and so on. If it can't practically enter many harbours, how do you make at sea replenishment viable?

- With such a large, expensive vessel, you're putting a lot of your eggs in a single basket. If you look at the increasingly distributed manner in which warfighting is undertaken (networked sensors, datalinking, autonomous platforms etc), do you think we're more likely to see a single, enormous vessel or a multitude of smaller, individually less capable but altogether more effective platforms?

- The idea that missiles instantly become obsolete once directed energy weapons enter the fray is faulty. If you cannot detect the missile, you cannot shoot it down, lasers or not - so wouldn't it make more sense to use increasingly low-observable weapons (as is being seen with designs such as JASSM and JSOW) and make use of the missile's strengths rather than abandoning them altogether? Or what about hypersonic missiles fast enough to give only a very limited window of engagement to a defence system, thus making it (however advanced) prone to being overwhelmed with sufficient numbers? Writing off powered, guided munitions as a weapons platform altogether on the assumption that laser weapons make them obsolete is a black and white view and doesn't make sense.

- You make the assertion that 30 inch gun turrets could be used if power is lost to the ship. This again makes me think you haven't thought the idea through properly, because if you had you'd know how much power is required to run such a turret, conventional or not. Put it this way - each turret on the Yamato-class battleships (3x 18.1 inch guns) weighed 2,700 tons. That's as much as an entire destroyer of that era. So you can imagine moving that kind of weight would take a LOT of power. Let alone operating the guns, which again requires substantial mechanical systems for training the barrels, hoisting ammunition (which would be enormously heavy, an 18.1 inch shell by comparison weighed 1.3 tons if I remember correctly, you're talking about a bore increase of a further 12 inches) from the magazines, and loading the weapons. So there would be no using such guns in the event of power loss. I realise this is a bit more nitpicky than the other points, but as I said, to me it indicates you haven't thought about this.

- The idea of parking this vessel off a continent to destroy a country seems like it would accomplish (if your calculations as to its destructive power were correct) in a week what a fleet of less vulnerable, less expensive ballistic missile submarines could accomplish in half an hour. You might say laser defences will make these ballistic missiles obsolete but as I indicated before, I couldn't disagree more. In fact, you talked about railgun projectiles moving at mach 12 - from my understanding, re-entry vehicles from a ballistic missile can be moving somewhere in the region of mach 25 when they enter the atmosphere. So who's to say lasers would be more effective against these weapons once they entered the terminal phase?

- Compared to an aircraft carrier this vessel appears to be quite one dimensional in its capacity to execute a given mission. A platform that contains many other platforms, each one capable of a variety of missions and each one's destructive potential able to be tailored to said mission, is a lot more flexible than one million tons of gigantic guns, in my opinion.

These are just off the top of my head, without deconstructing things in detail. I think you'll find other posts in the thread asked questions along similar lines, too. I thought these factors would be apparent without my saying so, but if not then fair enough. But I would encourage you to think along these lines, as injecting a dose of realism into one's posts is expected here and the above are all valid questions. I don't intend on starting a debate on the topic here any more than on the thread I closed, I just mention them here to avoid confusion and so you know why I closed that thread. I'll try to be more clear in future as to these expectations.

And just to clarify something road runner said, I'm not a defence professional myself, and don't want to portray myself as such. These questions as I've mentioned come about not from being a defence professional (and I'm sure they could add a level of detail I myself could not), but just from reading on the topic and applying what you learn to your own ideas.

I apologise if I offended you and if I wasn't clear. I hope the above has illustrated that there are reasons why we try to maintain a certain level of debate on these boards.

Cheers
 

AUS-man

New Member
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my original post in the thread... when I asked for some more thought and realism, I intended to convey that you go and have a look around for information on why such a ship might not be feasible. Do some research and that kind of thing. Off the top of my head, here are some issues with the idea:

- The size is such that it makes construction, replenishment, maintenance, crewing, navigation and evasion of enemy attack all extremely impractical. That's leaving out cost, which I think would probably be the least worrying of all of those. These are very serious issues which must be considered, and to address them I think you have to look at contemporary ship designs, relative tonnage, how docking such a large ship would work, what sealanes a warship could reasonably be expected to traverse in its service, what the draft of the ship would be and thus what harbours it could enter practically, and so on. If it can't practically enter many harbours, how do you make at sea replenishment viable?

- With such a large, expensive vessel, you're putting a lot of your eggs in a single basket. If you look at the increasingly distributed manner in which warfighting is undertaken (networked sensors, datalinking, autonomous platforms etc), do you think we're more likely to see a single, enormous vessel or a multitude of smaller, individually less capable but altogether more effective platforms?

- The idea that missiles instantly become obsolete once directed energy weapons enter the fray is faulty. If you cannot detect the missile, you cannot shoot it down, lasers or not - so wouldn't it make more sense to use increasingly low-observable weapons (as is being seen with designs such as JASSM and JSOW) and make use of the missile's strengths rather than abandoning them altogether? Or what about hypersonic missiles fast enough to give only a very limited window of engagement to a defence system, thus making it (however advanced) prone to being overwhelmed with sufficient numbers? Writing off powered, guided munitions as a weapons platform altogether on the assumption that laser weapons make them obsolete is a black and white view and doesn't make sense.

- You make the assertion that 30 inch gun turrets could be used if power is lost to the ship. This again makes me think you haven't thought the idea through properly, because if you had you'd know how much power is required to run such a turret, conventional or not. Put it this way - each turret on the Yamato-class battleships (3x 18.1 inch guns) weighed 2,700 tons. That's as much as an entire destroyer of that era. So you can imagine moving that kind of weight would take a LOT of power. Let alone operating the guns, which again requires substantial mechanical systems for training the barrels, hoisting ammunition (which would be enormously heavy, an 18.1 inch shell by comparison weighed 1.3 tons if I remember correctly, you're talking about a bore increase of a further 12 inches) from the magazines, and loading the weapons. So there would be no using such guns in the event of power loss. I realise this is a bit more nitpicky than the other points, but as I said, to me it indicates you haven't thought about this.

- The idea of parking this vessel off a continent to destroy a country seems like it would accomplish (if your calculations as to its destructive power were correct) in a week what a fleet of less vulnerable, less expensive ballistic missile submarines could accomplish in half an hour. You might say laser defences will make these ballistic missiles obsolete but as I indicated before, I couldn't disagree more. In fact, you talked about railgun projectiles moving at mach 12 - from my understanding, re-entry vehicles from a ballistic missile can be moving somewhere in the region of mach 25 when they enter the atmosphere. So who's to say lasers would be more effective against these weapons once they entered the terminal phase?

- Compared to an aircraft carrier this vessel appears to be quite one dimensional in its capacity to execute a given mission. A platform that contains many other platforms, each one capable of a variety of missions and each one's destructive potential able to be tailored to said mission, is a lot more flexible than one million tons of gigantic guns, in my opinion.
I agree
Cost alone would stop a project like that from existing,but also the size of it would make a very easy target to hit. In current times a lot of emphasis is placed on stealth and a ship like that built with stealth material (which would skyrocket the cost even more) would still be easy to spot by the shear size of it.

Really the only role for a battleship in todays world would be the support of amphibious operations, as for it in ship to ship combat a much smaller ship could sit outside the guns range and hit the ship with anti-ship missiles and destroy/severe damage (knocking out its ability to fight) making the guns useless against modern ships.
 
Top