Kind of hard to believe anybody could make excuses for shooting down civilian airliners.

If boosting maritime gunnery capability required no more than lifting a modern 155mm SP gun turret onto a ship I suspect we’d see plenty of such systems in service, as there is no shortage of excellent 155mm artillery systems for land use around the world. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple.

If ICBM’s are used then all of this argument is pointless, and the Russians are highly unlikely to use ICBM’s and trigger a devastating counter strike on their own country. Personally I think this is being milked by both sides for PR for their own purposes, it makes the Russians feel powerful and gives the RAF a good bogey man to argue for more resources for themselves at a time of a very tight defence budget, I really don’t see any of this as any more than PR on both sides.

Rapier is a short range point defence system and has to be judged as such, it is not an area defence system or high altitude system. Within it’s engagement envelope it is pretty effective and could certainly be used against MiG29’s or Su30’s, but it is certainly no wide area defence SAM.

I tend to favour an Iowa, they had better fire control (any weapon is only effective if it hits the target, otherwise it’s just noise and hot air), their armament arrangement was better IMO (judging armour is not just about thickness, it’s about arrangement) and realistically the US had the support and logistics to operate their battlewagons a lot more effectively than Japan.My own view is that Musashi and Yamato are the two most over rated vessels ever built, but that’s just my opinion. On Prinz Eugen, the German cruisers were fine ships made useless by dreadful engines, they seem to have spent as much time broken down as ever actually doing anything at sea, and they were very large and expensive ships for what they were, against a battle cruiser their armour would still have been useless and they were carrying an awful lot of weight for scouting. On battleship protection/vulnerability, there was a lot of luck involved and these days weapons could be programed to seek the weak spots, and they were very vulnerable under water, even in WW2 they couldn’t operate without air support when their was a risk of enemy air activity and were very aware of the submarine threat, ultimately there is a good reason why the battleship idea was already dying in WW2 and didn’t really live on much past the war other than for a handle of ships the USN kept active.

Such a ship is optimised for supporting ground forces and amphibious ops in areas where sea and air superiority has been established sufficiently to allow combined naval-land operations. So the ship can be pretty basic (read cheap), doesn’t need to be especially fact (c.18knots to keep pace with modern amphibs and commercial vessels) and would require no more than CIWS for self defence, such as a Phalanx on either beam. Basically a modern interpretation of the WW1 and WW2 monitor, a cheap and disposable means of getting heavy fire power into position to support the army and marines, no more. As to what that fire power should be, a version of MLRS would be credible (a re-invention of the rocket firing LST’s and landing craft of WW2?) as would a couple of high efficiency 155mm rapid firing guns, but I must admit, I’d love to see a surplus 16″ turret plonked onto a barge just to see those guns in action again. For years the RN retained a few battleship barrels exactly for the reason that manufacturing them was so dificult, just in case there was a need for them again, but they’re long since disposed of.

In Bismarck’s case, all that was needed was enough directional stability to keep the ship from being blown out to see. The jammed rudder left the ship unable to maintain any steady heading. I wonder if the bow propellers and manipulation of the main engines would have sufficed to keep her heading SE.

Probably highly unlikely unless speed was reduced to 2-3 knots, bow thrusters, azimuths and cyclodal units aren’t powerful enough to act against the main propulsion system except at very low speeds, and for a fwd thruster unit to have counter acted a jammed rudder would have reduced the Bismarck’s speed to the point of eliminating any chance of evading her pursuers.

A spiritual successor to the CVE, basically just a runway on a hull with a deck lift to a hangar, cheap, cheerful and it’d be useful for second rate carrier duties where all that’s wanted is a floating airfield to operate in areas with no developed air threat. Kind of like a carrier equivalent of Ocean. Another one I’ve wondered is this, it’s widely suggested that the psychological impact of 16″ guns gives them a military value far in excess of their actual effectiveness when used for shore bombardment. The Iowa battleships were a horrific drain on USN resources for a bit of shore bombardment and putting the sh*ts up enemies squaddies. So why not just re-invent the monitor, stick a 16″ gun turret on a cheap hull or glorified barge, minimum crew, only systems needed to fire their guns, effective, cheap and easy.