Thread from yesterday >33952158 I know that when aircraft

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>>33956115

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>>33956124

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>>33956138

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>>33956148
Last one.

>>33956152
From what I understand it's not so much the Aircraft carrier and aircraft themselves that has rendered the Battleship obsolete, but rather it's weapon technology.
Missiles, bombs and torpedoes and their tracking and accuracy.

People often ask if aircraft carriers are also becoming obsolete, I think that would only ever be the case due to a vastly increased speed and range of aircraft since sortie ratio is king now.

Shame that your last tread died, seemed interesting. At least it never lived long enough to attract BB-fags

>>33956115
>What sort of arguments were used against carriers?
Early carrier based torpedo bombers were slow, prone to malfunctions, had very small payload and it was very hard to actually hit moving, zig-zaging battleship with those(you can say the same about battleships and their artillery, but artillery could fire each 30-60 seconds on typical dreadnought battleship while airplane had to come back to carrier, refuel, rearm and had to come back to its target), also super fucking expensive.

This also goes on another level - torpedoes had small range, were slow, had relatively small payload and were unreliable as fuck in, let's say, early 30's.

Aircraft carriers were also considered useless as a ground-support vessels since majority of carrier-based airplanes were outperformed by ground-based contemporaries of them. The payload was again a problem - even today there's no single carrier capable of delivering amount of explosives Iowa class BB can with its main artillery only.

Another things was familiarity - battleship tactics were being developed since ~1850, evolving with changes to ironclads-then-battleships. Carriers were late WW1 invention, nobody knew how to use them. I mean simple question - how many aircraft carriers should carrier task force have? Japanese said - multiple with heavy screens, Americans said - one with smaller screen. Both approaches had advantages, until one of them proved superior on the battlefield, nobody knew which one is correct.

Lastly you have to understand that nobody tried to dismiss the concept of carriers. Every single naval officer understood the advantage of recon and air cover carriers provided to their fleets, it was only the question of whether the next big naval war will have numerous Jutlands or not. Some thought that yes, it will.

>>33956197
>From what I understand it's not so much the Aircraft carrier and aircraft themselves that has rendered the Battleship obsolete, but rather it's weapon technology.
>Missiles, bombs and torpedoes and their tracking and accuracy.

You mean simply having the aircraft circling angrily over the battleship won't sink it?

Next you're gonna tell me that the bombs, missiles and torpedoes have to somehow be delivered to the target to sink the enemy, instead of just sitting around in stockpile.

Bumping for your effort

>>33956245
even today there's no single carrier capable of delivering amount of explosives Iowa class BB can with its main artillery only
How did you reach that conclusion?

>>33956541
Check the amount of ammo Iowa carries, explosive filler in them and then compare it with how much shit can carrier airgroup drop on the target in the best conditions and how much of it they can store on the carrier.

If you count sortie rate in and want to find some silly tons of explosives/hour you can do this too, but every time you do it the result will be the same. Iowa's main battery>carrier air group.

Which doesn't mean Iowa is better than CAG, CAG has advantage of range, which is extremely important in ground support operation. It just means that if you'd have to fight Iwo Jima again, you'd be better off taking battleship instead of aircraft carrier as your main mean of ground support.

>>33956541
And no battleship could hit targets in Afghanistan while still in the Red Sea, while a Nimitz class carrier with its F-18 can.

The battleship MIGHT make a comeback the day railgun technology becomes applicable in frontline weaponry, but I guess they wouldn't even be battleships but rather battlecruisers, aka BB-sized ships with less armor (what's gonna withstand a railgun hit anyways) but much faster. Slap a nuclear reactor in them, two batteries of railguns, one big gun battery to unload HE at shorter ranges, and one AShM/light ballistic missile battery and voila, you've got the 21st century Yamato, Iowa or Rodney.

>>33956620
Well, i'm fucking bored of studying for finals anyway:

Each Iowa gun carries about 130 rounds, with about 1220 rounds total being the norm. Each HE-High Capacity has a weight of 860 kg, with an explosive charge of about 70 kg.
1220x860kg gives 1 049 200 kg shell load, of which "only" 85 400 kg is HE.
1 Mk 84 2000 pound JDAM is 907 kg, with 429 kg HE.
An F-18E can carry 17000 pounds of ordinance, on 11 stations. For simplicity, lets not focus on strike range here, same goes for gun-range on the Iowa. Also, i think only the 6 wing-stations on the F-18 can carry bombs, so that excludes the wing-tips and belly/center-line stations.
That gives each F-18E a total of
6 x 2000 pound JDAM's, or 12 000 pounds of ordinance of which 2580 kg is HE.

A current carrier has 4 VFA's, or 4x12 attack aircraft. This is addition to all the other stuff like AWACS, helo's, COD's and so on.
So, these 48 F-18's alone can drop, in one pass, 576 000 pounds of ordinance, of which 123 840 kg are HE. Which is almost 40 000 kg more than the entire HE load that a Iowa can store.

Further, finding any numbers as to how much, say, a Nimitz can carry, and the munitions breakdown, is hard, security and all that. The closest i came was an article from 2010, about the loading of Stennis with 6 000 000 pounds of munitions. Ofcourse, all of this is not bombs, as missiles, rounds for the guns and so on is also counted. But, bombs are the bread and butter of carrier operations, so lets cut it in half and say no more than 3 000 000 pounds are bombs or bomb-related. Which is not so much more than the total weight in shells carried by an Iowa desu.

Highly superficial and like you said, conditions, optimization, range, pro's and con's and everything

>>33956820
Also, dont rape me for mixing metric and freedom units

>>33956620
The issue with this line of thinking is that people still think shore bombardment is how wars are fought, it's not.
Surgical strikes using cruise missiles then landing ground troops is far better than the general bombardment from a highly inaccurate (in comparison) shelling.

Civilian casualties, even military casualties need to be kept to a minimum or the media eats them alive, not to mention the security of the ships themselves.
The last time a battleship was used for shore bombardment there was a good chance one of them could have been lost. USS Missouri took fire from just two missiles, one missed and the other was knocked out of the air by the British HMS Gloucester using a Sea Dart, downing the missile with just 600m to spare, the conflict then moved on so her batteries were out of range and she spent the rest of the war taking out mines.

But this is all irrelevant as nuclear weapons mean there will never be a conflict between the "real" military powers of the planet in any serious way, if it did happen then the war will be over in hours or day not months and years, as facilities and bases are ICBM'd into the dirt.

>>33956855

ICBMs are steadily aging and becoming less and less relevant as APS technology catches up to them. Once they're obsolete, the floodgates to conventional war will open once again and nobody will know what to do since the last major conventional war happened a lifetime ago.

>>33957490
Absolutely not, conventional warfare between nuclear armed countries is finished, even if active protection systems could 100% intercept ICBM's.

M.A.D means the nukes don't even need to hit the target country. A world ending event just needs to detonate enough payload anywhere on the planet to create a nuclear winter.
With that threat conventional warfare just will never happen.

>>33957725
You're retarded. Nuclear winter calculations are wrong.

>>33957725

Peace due to MAD isn't about nuclear winter, it's about possessing a large & survivable second strike capability, that even if your enemy was very confident they could destroy 90%+ of your nuclear arsenal in a first strike, you would still be able to deliver enough warheads in reply to cause unacceptable damage to their country.

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>>33956115

>>33956115
>It seems kind of obvious that a ship capable of carrying torpedo bombers is going to BTFO everything else, especially large, slow targets that cannot really dodge torpedoes.
It does now to us with the benefit of hindsight, but until Prince of Wales went down no significant warship had been sunk while at sea as a result purely of air power. Incidentally I believe all the aircraft involved in that attack were in fact land based, but that's beside the point, air power alone had never shown itself to be capable of winning a naval engagement until then because it was still a maturing technology. Whilst the advantages of long range reconnaisance were, as others have mentioned, well recognised, it was a big gamble to consider carrier based aviation over battleships as your primary strike force when they were so unproven at the time.
Battleships on the other hand were a proven technology that everyone understood, you build yours with bigger guns, engines and armor than the other guy and you're a long way towards winning already. That makes supporting them a pretty safe bet over the unproven carrier-centric concept.

>>33956245
>Americans said - one with smaller screen.
not true at all.

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>>33957725
It's all about the possibilities. If the enemy can wipe out most of your population even if you can intercept 90% of the inbound then MAD still works.
We do need some sort of missile defense for the smaller less "responsible" entities.

>>33956820
Fuck thats a lot of lead either way

>>33960628
haha dong

>>33958243
Taranto and Pearl Harbor?

>>33956115
When Billy Mitchell pulled his stunts, aircraft were still slow, lightly armed, and easy to shoot down.

Within 15 years, fighters (and some medium bombers!) were hitting 400mph.

The one place where surface ships still mattered, almost up to the very end of the war, was at night or in bad weather. Enterprise became an experiment in night aviation in 1945, but for the most part, the dark still belonged to surface actions.

>>33956632

He's illustrating the disparity in firepower, not advocating the return of BBs. Please shut the fuck up.

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>>33956115
Credit to OP for starting the first "Thing X vs. Thing Y" thread since I've been here that hasn't turned into total shitposting.

>>33966815

As another anon has already pointed out, the disparity favors the carrier.

Additionally, shells are imprecise. It will take more of them to do the jobs that single GBU's can.

>>33966893
Im kinda suprised as well. It sure has the potential for it

>>33966939
Just imagine if AZON, BAT, etc. had been developed in the run-up to the war.

We were sooo close to seeing the widespread use of guided weapons.

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What would it take for Carriers to be rendered obsolete, without using memes.
Low earth orbit travelling fighters/drones/missles that can cross the globe in hours?

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>>33968707

>>33968707
A combination of some sort of orbital directed-energy weapon, and any kind of recon system that is capable of relaying exact positional information in real time.
Just about anything else can be countered in some way or another.

>>33970509
Have fun trying to power a useful laser in space; there is a reason that all applications for small nuclear reactors up to date involve the sea.

>>33956115
>My question is, what arguments were there in favour of battleships over carriers?
Actual striking power (early carrier aircraft were kinda shit), the ability to survive damage, practical usage against moving targets, sustained combat ability (carrier planes blow their load and have to return, battleships can just keep shooting for hours).