Military History | How To Make War | Wars Around the World Rules of Use How to Behave on an Internet Forum
Surface Forces Discussion Board
   Return to Topic Page
Subject: BBG + BBG/CVN Battlegroup
OzWarrior    7/2/2006 8:43:58 AM
I was thinking, if the US decided to build a modern battleship, with the big guns (I was thinkg 8 16" in two quad mounts then 5' nad 3' extras) but also integrated helos and a large VLS battery you'd have an extremly powerful warship that could deal with any surface threat imaginable and take as much of a beating as anyone could give. It has already been discussed the amount of power needed to get through a battleships armour. So here we have a ship with the armour to stand in close to shore to provide gunnery support for ground units. And provide Long range missile support without being worried about getting hit themselves. and the "Sh!+-in-their-pants" factor of a battlegroup with a Battleship and CVN would be amazing. Being able to send a Capital ship into someones harbour without facing anything that can sink her with 80+ warplanes 5 minutes away is a powerful tool. Stregic WMD is pointless nowadays becuase no one has the bals to use them in anger sending a convetional force into a harbour that can level anything within 40km of it is a much stronger message. As a side note I think the ability to put over 8 tons of steel and HE into another ship in a single salvo is pretty neat.
 
Quote    Reply

Show Only Poster Name and Title     Newest to Oldest
Pages: 1 2
Griffin    RE:BBG + BBG/CVN Battlegroup   7/10/2006 11:12:32 PM
In many of the discussion I've read about BB large gun needs, I keep on going back to the past. In it some may find a possible solution. Namely the use of large cruisers to fullfill former BB and CG roles. It is interesting that the Cleveland Light Cruiser of WWII was larger than today's Ticonderoga CG, and the Salem Class Heavy Cruiser was even larger. Going back to a slightly larger platform 600-650 feet in length with a 65-70 foot beam would allow for two 16-inch triple gun turrets, 2 SAM batteries, encasement guns in the way of 57mm and/or 76mm Malera OTO, Cruise and anti-shipping missiles, a couple of ASW/SAR helo's, four Phalynx for not only air defence but very importantly close in weapons that can take out threats like the one the hit the USS Cole, torpedoes, and types of 'chaff' to overwhelm incoming missiles as a last line of defence. Sometime take a look at what the Cleveland and Salem Class Cruisers of WWII had, consider the vast advancements we have made since then in technology that would increase the vessels design, speed, lower profile, etc. and you could have a winner. The alternate to the 16-inch guns could also be advanced versions of the Mk71 8-inch auto firing gun that was successfully tested and proven in the 1970's. With advancements in munitions with everything from missile assist now heading for ranges comparable to the old 16-inch, to GPS for extreme accuracy there may be a reasonable alternative to the old BB that would be much more manpower intensive, not to mention other costs.
 
Quote    Reply

xylene       6/26/2007 10:11:29 AM
With today's technology we should be able to build 16 or 18 inch turrets that can fire like a machine gun. Imagine the fear the enemy would have if you had a ship that could fire 16 inch salvos at 300 to 400 rounds per minute! It would be devastating. You could litterally saturate a coastline with endless vollys of steel rain. Stick about 5 to 10 MLRS launchers in combination with 3 turrets you could put up a wall of lead that would pulverize anything in it's path.
 
Quote    Reply

Lawman       6/26/2007 2:50:23 PM
The problem with that idea is the sheer heat involved - large guns get very hot, hence any rate of fire beyond around 10 per minute is not easy in large calibres. If you genuinely want fire support, then the best bet would be the 155mm Advanced Gun System, which can reach out to 180km with guided rounds. If this were mounted in a four gun mount, then two mounts would give eight guns, each with a rate of fire of 10 rounds per minute, i.e. a total of eighty rounds per minute. A better version of the old Arsenal Ship concept, probably around 25,000 tons, could easily mount two or even four of these mounts (depending on the flight deck arrangements), and a massive number of VLS cells. For more fire support, you could carry a mix of Polar-GMLRS (navalised GMLRS with much more range), NTACMS (naval ATACMs), and Tomahawks, plus defensive missiles. If the ship had four of these turrets, i.e. two fore and two aft, then you can put out 160 rounds per minute, and this could be sustained for a good while.
 
Admittedly the 155mm round may not have the 'feel' of a big 16in shell, it is probably a better bet - for larger targets, you've always got larger weapons, like NATACMS and Tomahawk, and airstrikes. For the overwhelming majority of targets, a 155mm shell is more than enough, and it is arguably better to have more usable rounds, than spend a fortune designing a new large round, that you find yourself unable to use a lot of the time (for fear of it being overkill).
 
Quote    Reply

B.Smitty       6/26/2007 3:23:11 PM
How often do we bombard coastlines? 

BBs hit targets in ODS, but they could've just as easily (and more economically) been hit by airpower. 

Battleships are massively expensive platforms for firing modestly prices munitions.  The CONOPs that drove their development proved faulty in the 1940s.  Nothing has changed since then.

They just don't make sense anymore.

 
Quote    Reply

Lawman       6/26/2007 3:40:20 PM
Actually, the answer to when naval gunfire support was last used might surprise some - it was used extensively in Op Iraqi Freedom / Op Telic, in particular the taking of the Al Faw peninsular. It was used a huge amount in the Falklands conflict. In short, naval gunfire support is not at all uncommon, its just that it does not involve battleships firing for hours on end. Hence my suggestion of using a modified version of the Arsenal Ship - it gives you lots of VLS cells for cruise missiles, and a gun system which can be used from a good distance. Naval guns are able to fire against lots of targets, and the ability to fire lots of rounds can come in very handy. If you can fire, say, 144 rounds, you can put a 12x12 square out of operation, and due to the deadly radius, that could be ~250m by 250m, a huge area! If we ever need to do an opposed beach landing - and this should not be written off as a possibility, then the ability to completely obliterate the area behind the beach could be very useful.
 
Quote    Reply

B.Smitty       6/26/2007 3:52:46 PM

The problem with that idea is the sheer heat involved - large guns get very hot, hence any rate of fire beyond around 10 per minute is not easy in large calibres. If you genuinely want fire support, then the best bet would be the 155mm Advanced Gun System, which can reach out to 180km with guided rounds. If this were mounted in a four gun mount, then two mounts would give eight guns, each with a rate of fire of 10 rounds per minute, i.e. a total of eighty rounds per minute. A better version of the old Arsenal Ship concept, probably around 25,000 tons, could easily mount two or even four of these mounts (depending on the flight deck arrangements), and a massive number of VLS cells. For more fire support, you could carry a mix of Polar-GMLRS (navalised GMLRS with much more range), NTACMS (naval ATACMs), and Tomahawks, plus defensive missiles. If the ship had four of these turrets, i.e. two fore and two aft, then you can put out 160 rounds per minute, and this could be sustained for a good while.


Why even bother with AGS?  POLAR and smaller missiles like P44 and Netfires plus 5" guns seem like more than enough to me.

AGS is a brand-new gun mount requiring a brand-new, gun-launched missile munition.  It won't fit (easily) on existing hulls without ripping out most of their VLS cells.  It may not even be able to use existing stocks of 155mm projectiles and definitely can't use standard propellant charges.

POLAR could be quad-packed per VLS cell and carried by every AEGIS warship in the fleet.

P44/Netfires might be nine-packable per VLS cell. 

For folks that worry that VLS cells require a trip back to base to reload, we can put them on pallets and ship them over on cargo vessels when we need to fire a massive number off.

The only way AGS makes sense to me is if it can reasonably fire cheap, unguided munitions for the majority of it's projected uses.  Otherwise it's just a really big, expensive, technically challenging way to launch small, expensive missiles off of a handful of ships.

 
Quote    Reply

Jeff_F_F       6/29/2007 1:47:17 AM
The idea behind the naval railguns being developed is that when they get up to the planned 64Mj they'll be able to hit any target in North Korea, as reported earlier in another SP thread : >
 
The railgun itself isn't the problem, it is making a guidance system that can survive the launch.
 
Such a weapon is really the only reason I see for creating a modern era battleship, due to the power requirements of such a weapon.
 
As to whether ships are built to survive an attack by the weapons they carry, in a word no. To put this into perspective lets look at a rough spectrum of pre-airpower ships:
 
Torpedo boats: light fast boats that carried torpedos. Massive offensive power, practically no armor. They were the tactical precursors to submarines and torpedo bombers, using hit and run tactics to attack more powerful and valuable targets. Trying to make these boats protected from the weapons they carried would be utterly defeating the point.
 
Destroyers: Light warships used to patrol, scout, and screen the main fleet. They got their name from their role of destroyers of torpedo boats, later this expanded to ASW and air defense. Because they were relatively lightly armed they might well have been defended from their own weapons, but only by coincidence because their role was not primarily to fight other destroyers.
 
Light Cruisers: The lightest ships designed to operate independently, primarily served as raiders or to attack destroyers--to deny the enemy intellegence or to clear the way for an attack by lighter vessels. Generally very lightly armored if armored at all to reduce their displacement and hence their drag as much as possible, and hence were fast enough to avoid battle with anything heavier.
 
Cruisers: designed to fight battles not important enough to send a battleship into, generally ending up fighting other cruisers. As a result they were in fact designed more or less to be defended from weapons similar to their own. Cool.
 
Battlecruisers: Cruiser armor, battleship guns. Designed to destroy anything execpt a battleship, and run away from battleships. Obviously not armored to protect against their own guns.
 
Battleships: Heavy surface combatants able to destroy anything except another battleship hands down if it didn't run away. Could fight other battleships on equal terms, hence roughly armored against own guns.
 
So even in the old days you really only have 2, maybe 3 classes of vessels that were armored against guns as heavy as they carried.
 
Airpower changed all of that because even battleships could be easily destroyed by aircraft, just as they had once been vulnerable to torpedo boats. But while torpedo boats could be destroyed by conventional ship guns, increasingly more and more specialized defensive systems were required to defend against aircraft forcing specialized vessels to be developed to field them. In addition, the aircraft could attack from far beyond the range of a battleship, causing the range at which battles took place to extend beyond the range at which targets for naval gunfire could be spotted. Hence battleships became obsolete as the decisive surface combatant, and were therafter mostly relegated to the role of floating artillery for shore bombardments--a task which hardly required half a meter of armor. Since ship to ship combat hardly ever took place anymore the role of the cruiser also changed. Cruisers today are technically fit a role somewhere between a light cruiser (unarmored surface combatant), a battlecruiser (heavily armed surface combatant with light armor) or a really big destroyer (since their primary job is generally to defend against aircraft, the torpedo boats of the modern world).
 
Quote    Reply
1 2



 Latest
 News
 
 Most
 Read
 
 Most
 Commented
 Hot
 Topics