The return of the Battleships and end of the carrier?

The carrier will never go away. When surface ships become obsolete, we will build them in space and call them battlestars. 😀

Don’t know. Carriers and their aircraft keep getting more and more expensive. Pilots too, and fuel, and maintanence. Using a railgun to put a 50lb warhead on a target 500 miles away is going to be WAY cheaper than trying to get it there with an aircraft and it’ll get it there faster too. Once they’ve got the technology down I just don’t see how you can compete from a cost standpoint. “but the zoomies think airplanes are cool” is only going to get you so far.

The carrier will never go away. When surface ships become obsolete, we will build them in space and call them battlestars. 😀

I will try and find the source. Saw an interesting write up some time back with one naval “expert” debating a need to stand up the Iowa class again with new production RAP 16″ ammo, as opposed to spending all the money on some kind of DDX thing with RAP 5″. This also included a discussion of various GPS assisted artillery rockets.

The point is valid in that a Marine or whatever doesn’t care how the fire support happens ( be it artillery or air ) just as long as the fire support is useful and available. I am in the opinion that we need more long range/extreme range GPS assisted rocket artillery. JSF B etc will happen I am pretty sure, however I think ship based artillery/rocket fire support needs to be pushed more than it currently is.

About the Iowa class though as mentioned by one naval person, it sounds good but we are just flat out of money for things. The manpower needed to run and sustain an Iowa class would be a huge show stopper with the PowerPoint warriors. Nice thing about rocket fires, is they don’t collect flight pay and need massive amounts of sustainment and training that a fighter squadron does.

I agree, trying to put the Iowas back in service would be a BAD idea. WAY to much man power to operate one, they’re old, and a WWII cannon is NOT a substitute for a rail gun.

On the money side of things maybe they could do a two for six swap. Cut by two the number of replacements you buy for the Nimitz class and substitute six battleships in their place. The temptation would be to make an uber-Kirov but then the cost goes way up so maybe you just look at it like a carrier but with guns instead of aircraft. Meaning other than the guns you might have some close in defenses and you’re built like the proverbial brick sh!thouse but other than that all the fancy air and missile defenses and ASW are on other ships. So maybe you have four big guns in a 2 x 2 configuration up front, CIWS (say solidstate lasers and ESSM) amidships, and a big flight deck to the rear for helicopters. Maybe 64 VLS cells in there somewhere for the REALLY long shots. I don’t know for sure the details but I’m convinced this is the next step in the evolution of capital ships at least for the strike role. You really can’t equal the air defense ability of a carrier with it’s AWACS aircraft unless you’ve got 24/7 space based radar access though IMO.

I will try and find the source. Saw an interesting write up some time back with one naval “expert” debating a need to stand up the Iowa class again with new production RAP 16″ ammo, as opposed to spending all the money on some kind of DDX thing with RAP 5″. This also included a discussion of various GPS assisted artillery rockets.

The point is valid in that a Marine or whatever doesn’t care how the fire support happens ( be it artillery or air ) just as long as the fire support is useful and available. I am in the opinion that we need more long range/extreme range GPS assisted rocket artillery. JSF B etc will happen I am pretty sure, however I think ship based artillery/rocket fire support needs to be pushed more than it currently is.

About the Iowa class though as mentioned by one naval person, it sounds good but we are just flat out of money for things. The manpower needed to run and sustain an Iowa class would be a huge show stopper with the PowerPoint warriors. Nice thing about rocket fires, is they don’t collect flight pay and need massive amounts of sustainment and training that a fighter squadron does.

You convinced me Sferrin. Forgot just how large a 16inch shell would be. Plenty of volume for a scamjet /etc. Additionally shells have got to have a lower cost of ownership than carrier plus airwing plus weapon themselves

I think it all downs to a special event to demonstrate the potential of such concept! Just like Air raid on Pearl Harbour in 1941 to cement the superiority of aircraft carrier and naval aviation!

What I could believe is a super sub and not a battleship to claim superiority on naval warfare with the usage of cruise missiles.

Too many down sides. Aircraft carriers and “battleships” in addition to their fighting potential are also show-of-force weapons. Back in ’97 when China was getting all pissy with Taiwan the US sent two carriers into the area and things cooled right down. Can’t do that with a sub because a sub can’t be seen unless you’re cruising around on the surface in which case you don’t need a sub. Also the sub has effectively zero airspace control capability.

On a related note, I was wondering what kind of ammunition a railgun would use, or more specifically, what material would it be made of to prevent it from vaporizing in flight? ceramic-based or depleted uranium perhaps?

It would probably use a variety of ammunition depending on the target. For the heat I’ve read of using a droppable carbon carbon shield that gets it through the initial few seconds of flight in the dense atmosphere. After that they could just have ceramic edges or coatings or something. Obviously they’ve got their work cut out for them engineering relatively brittle ceramic materials to withstand tens of thousands of G’s at launch but then this isn’t something they’re going to put in the water next week.

A scramjet assisted projectile is a very good idea but surely it will be constrained in size (it has to fit a railgun launcher / barrell) vs a potentially much larger uav / jsf deployed hypersonic missile which obviously wont be hypersonic when launched but can be much larger than railgun weapon plus be fired from medium altitudes.

For sake of arguement let’s say the upper limit on railgun size is 16″ bore. With the square sabot/armature you should be able to easily squeeze in an 8-10″ scramjet powered projectile (which needn’t be a short-squat round but could have a relatively high length-diameter ratio). They’re already designing them for 5″ guns (designing, not deploying).

“Scramfire
Scramfire is the application of scramjet technology to U.S. Army direct-fire and indirect-fire applications and U.S. Navy extended range munitions. A Scramfire application, as envisioned by the U.S. Army, would offer revolutionary advances in lethality, lethality at range, and elimination of depleted uranium as a penetrator material. For the U.S. Navy, Scramfire will facilitate a next generation of extended range munitions for naval surface-fire support with five-inch guns.

For multi-services, Scramfire offers a near-term and affordable development path that supports, ensures, or replaces the capabilities of electro-magnetic guns. “

The projectile wouldn’t necessarily fly in a scramjet cruise condition (in fact it would probably be very unlikely) but the combination of railgun and scramjet would be used to accelerate it to a VERY high velocity and then it flys a ballistic path to the target and uses terminal guidance.

Thus range advantage should in theory always lie with air launched weapon which by being less dimensionally constrained can carry more propellent for greater ranges..

Not necessarily. You’re forgetting a couple things. First the tremendous kick the round gets at the beginning. Say it leaves the muzzle at Mach 8. How much fuel would your missile use getting up to Mach 8 and how big will your missile have to be as a result? Also, your aircraft will have to return to the carrier to pick up more while the battleship just continues on *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang*

Looking at soviet antishipping missiles clearly size and range are linked, the soviet meteorite hypersonic missile being positively huge in dimensions given high speed and range requirements.

Size and range aren’t necessarily linked. Compare Fasthawk and Yakhont. Fasthawk was to carry a 700lb warhead for 700 miles at Mach 4 and would have weighed around 3200lbs. Yakhont carries a smaller warhead for about a quarter of the range at half the speed yet weighs twice as much.

Besides, you’re not comparing apples to apples. One is a gun round, the other is a missile.

The problem with submarines is actually endurance of the offensive, not endurance of stealth. Subs are great for launching a few cruise missiles at an enemy, but if you are actually wanting to cause real damage (rather than simply give them a wake-up call), then they are a poor platform.

Even the most powerfully armed (for land attack anyway) submarine, the Ohio class SSGNs, are limited to around 154 missiles. This may sound like a lot, but when you consider that a carrier could hit that many targets in a single strike sortie (for a large carrier) or single day (small carrier), it sounds less impressive. When you then consider that the carrier could keep up that pace for a number of days, whereas the submarine would take weeks to be reloaded (return to suitable base, reload, return to theatre of ops), it becomes obvious that the carriers days are not numbered yet!

I think it all downs to a special event to demonstrate the potential of such concept! Just like Air raid on Pearl Harbour in 1941 to cement the superiority of aircraft carrier and naval aviation!

What I could believe is a super sub and not a battleship to claim superiority on naval warfare with the usage of cruise missiles.

With sub sea endurance getting longer,getting more quiet and lesser weak point plus a big factor of moving stealthy underwater! Sub will be the perfect platform to deliver devastating attack on enemy with very low chance of getting detect!

Infact,sub is the only platform capable of repeating the similiar surprise atack on enemy naval and airbase with one destructive decisive attack. With satelite and advance sensor available in present modern warfare,surface fleet are hard to escape from detection of these sensor.

Imagine 6 sub each capable of engaging 4 target each firing 2 cruise missiles on each target and launching a total of 48 cruise missiles at the same time in the first wave and targeting a total of 24 targets from a range of 220km away from enemy naval base! A second missiles attack will ensure complete wipe out of huge naval fleet even the size of US fleet could not sustain some heavy loss!

On a related note, I was wondering what kind of ammunition a railgun would use, or more specifically, what material would it be made of to prevent it from vaporizing in flight? ceramic-based or depleted uranium perhaps?

I guess it all comes down to power. If a nuclear reactor can generate the truly enormous amounts of energy required, perhaps a railgun missile doesn’t need much propellent to coast along from initial extreme accelerastion of railgun. If this is not the case I would say range advantage must lie with air launched hypersonuic missiles deployed by carrier aircraft.

A scramjet assisted projectile is a very good idea but surely it will be constrained in size (it has to fit a railgun launcher / barrell) vs a potentially much larger uav / jsf deployed hypersonic missile which obviously wont be hypersonic when launched but can be much larger than railgun weapon plus be fired from medium altitudes. Thus range advantage should in theory always lie with air launched weapon which by being less dimensionally constrained can carry more propellent for greater ranges. Looking at soviet antishipping missiles clearly size and range are linked, the soviet meteorite hypersonic missile being positively huge in dimensions given high speed and range requirements.

Thing is though with a railgun of the right size and nuclear power to drive it you could easily get a scramjet powered projectile up to some pretty high speeds/ranges. While you’re UAV is plodding along and getting tanked up dozens of projectiles have already landed on your carrier. Sure you could have an Aegis-type take shots at these incoming projectiles but a battleship would be able to carry many times more relatively “dumb” rounds than a cruiser could carry SAMs capable of hitting such a target. Of course long distance targeting would be an issue but maybe you do like they’d considered doing to the Iowas at one point. Keep the big guns up front and put VLS and a small flight deck to the rear. Even better you could do something like a nuclear powered Kiev with UCAVs and AWACs/Jammers (probably just a matter of time before you can do both missions with one aircraft) and put the big railguns up front instead of SS-N-12s.

Its an interesting concept but what you propose is just a longer ranged engagement between opponent vessels. If say by 2020 we have such battleships, what stops them from being cobbled down by uavs deployed by carrier firing hypersonic (developed for new U.S long range strike bomber) antishipping weapons likely to be available in the same timescale? What we have is a repeat of Yamato vs Aircraft carrier. As long as carrier maintains distance (past defence zones were some 600kms just to defeat Backfire threats of 80s), this new battleship will be impotent but uavs and or jsf will easily have an engagerment range advantage to say nothing of fact that the U.S would retain carriers simply because of their huge investment in them. If carriers had 600km plus buffer zones to defeat backfire threats obviously they can do the same against battleship. Unfortunately for battleship, at this range AND greater the carrier via uavs and or JSF can strike out and engage battleship. Perhaps if battleship was stealthy like DDX it may stand some chance of survival but long range artillery is not a decisive capability against carrier aviation (shame, such a ship would look awesome).

In that scenario the carrier would mostly serve as a mobile base for reconnaisance UAVs, in addition to fleet airdefence. You need to find out what to shoot those railguns and missiles at, and satellites have the disadvantage of limited surveillance time for a given area of interest.

I’m sure the ground troops would be atleast a bit sceptical of a CAS concept where the shooter can’t see his target with his own eyes too.

They’re doing CAS from 40,000 in a B-52 at times. Besides I’d think a Marine F-35B from an assault ship could handle that. Also CAS has been done mainly by the USAF or Marines not USN. I’m not saying the USN NEVER does it but it’s not at the top of their list AFAIK.

In that scenario the carrier would mostly serve as a mobile base for reconnaisance UAVs, in addition to fleet airdefence. You need to find out what to shoot those railguns and missiles at, and satellites have the disadvantage of limited surveillance time for a given area of interest.

I’m sure the ground troops would be atleast a bit sceptical of a CAS concept where the shooter can’t see his target with his own eyes too.