Had you read my AAR, you wouldn't have to imagine.
Now you do, because all the links are dead.
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Now you do, because all the links are dead.
I hope you are being sarcastic.
(I read your AAR back when you were writing it and I liked it, btw)
I am being sarcastic, but the part about both USSR and GER having less tanks and airplanes in the game is true. As is the bit about the save files.
We were discussing shore bombardment, which for a variety of reasons battleships excel at. I think we can all agree that for naval warfare in general that aircraft carriers were more useful.
My favorite story on that score happens at Normandy, where a German unit is assembling for a heavy counter-attack just beyond the range of heavy guns of the escort fleet. With this intelligence in hand, the Captain of the USS Texas floods his ballast tanks until his ship is listing 15 degrees to one side and opens fire, obliterating the entire assembled german force.
Shore bombardments are nothing to play around with when you have shells the size of cars ripping apart the sky overhead.
Hmm wasnt it 5 degress or so ? Sorry just nitpicking still an awesome story. If I remember right the captain of the Texas almost managed to put his ship on the beach at one occasion
Thats what I call close Battleship fire support :laugh:
Thats what I call close Battleship fire support :laugh:
My dad served in the Navy in the Vietnam war. Popular story was that a VC/NVA unit that was assigned to hauling supplies was under fire from the 16" guns and surrendered after a near miss by a dud killed an elephant that was being used to move heavy items. When they saw the size of the shell their commanding officer got his men together and marched to the nearest U.S. soldiers to surrender - Said they didn't want to fight anyone who would shoot something like that at them.
Hmm wasnt it 5 degress or so ? Sorry just nitpicking still an awesome story. If I remember right the captain of the Texas almost managed to put his ship on the beach at one occasion
Thats what I call close Battleship fire support :laugh:
Ah, 15 degrees? No, total typo, I thought I had said five, so good catch, herr fraulein. My compliments to the Swabian educational system. And at 15 degrees plus the rifles recoil I wonder if the ship wouldn't just roll over?
But double checking my numbers, it states it was only a 2 degree list.
On the other hand, US Marine Corps loves the battleships of US Navy because of their ability to give fire support and to the fact that someone else is responsible to maintain and operate them. That kind of large ships are very expensive to maintain and they require very large crews as well.
This is of course a very interesting point. I haven't read the rest of the thread, but the immense gunfire support provided on D-Day (and during the subsequent days) must be one of the strong contributing factors behind the success of the operation. By considering this, their investment is entirely justified!
It is for exactly this reason that all four of the Iowa class battleships are maintained in ready reserve status even though they are also officially museum ships. The USMC wants to have them available if they are ever needed for a massive amphibious invasion. there is quite simply nothing like them anymore. For example they are immune to all modern anti ship missiles - they have to much armor. All the discussions about bunker buster bombs and deep penetrator bombs are a moot point - none of them perform as well as the 16" AP projectiles at punching through steel and concrete. During their last active duty period in the 80's and 90's they were refitted with modern sleeping arrangements, radar and communications gear, nuclear armed cruise missiles, etc. Aside from their guns, the other thing that has kept them in service for so long are their engines. They are some of the few non nuclear powered capital ships able to keep up with modern aircraft carriers. A friend of mines dad served on the Missouri for a number of years and stated that during flight launching maneuvers in the mid 80's they kept up with the USS enterprise at 38-40 knots for the several hours it took for that evolution to be completed. That's impressive. Very few destroyers and almost no other ships are capable of doing that. Also interesting to note is that he mentioned that when it accelerated to top speed the Enterprise actually leaned backwards and threw a rooster tail like a speedboat - he had never seen anything like it. Newer carriers aren't that fast topping out at 34-36 knots - the Enterprise was the first nuclear powered carrier and (as it turned out) was massively overpowered.
A few hours or days worth of heavy bombardment is not nearly enough to satisfy the investment. The same effect could be achieved by putting those big guns on floating batteries, and save yourself all the other equipment. The AA platform, also mentioned in this thread, could, IMHO, be as well satisfied by putting those guns on dedicated AA cruisers.
Shore defences are a problem tho.These are very dangerous and a BB was almost the only ship with a reasonable chance to silence bigger ones. Even smaller ones or DP guns would be dangerous to a pure gun platform. Last but not least you need a large stable platform to fire guns like this.
The Battle of Wake island is a good example of what happens if you attempt to close with shore batteries without sufficient armor.
Actually there were such things as 'dedicated gun platforms' they were called coastal monitors. They were a miserable failure. They had guns like a battleship but thinner armor and much less speed. They wound up either sunk immediately or simply bypassed as they were to slow to get to the decisive points at the critical times. To top it off as Graf Zeppelin pointed out you still need a rather large ship to be able to carry guns that big and make it stable enough to shoot. Each turret for the Iowa class battleships weighs 2,100 tons. You need a ship of around 10 - 15000 tons to be able to carry something like that and be stable enough to shoot it. This brings up the final failure of coastal monitors - they were very expensive - you could build a full size fully capable battleship for the cost of 2 maybe 2 1/2 monitors. Then consider that monitors carried 2 or at most 4 heavy guns where as a battleship would carry between 8 and 12 and you realize that just on straight cost alone the monitors were worthless, leaving aside the fact that they were less capable.
Oh, you're talking about guided munition. Never mind me, I thought you were talking about things like waiting to be inside the bunker before exploding. Speaking of guidance, I'm not sure you can really make precise corrections in the trajectory of a 1.200kg shell shot at 3.000km/h. Precision aiming, on the other hand, I assume would be fairly possible.Well, it is always better to hit a pillbox directly than somewhere 100m apart