Timelordwho wrote:
What would you even fight with a battleship in this day and age, Kavekk?
One of the navies you'd lose wholesale to, or one of the ones you can beat with a missile frigate?
Battleships are still great for ordinance delivery to shore targets. I'd rather send a $3,000 16" shell at a target and obliterate it into a large crater than send a $1,000,000 cruise missile to do the same thing. The naval rail gun project has a working gun, it shoots, it stands up to repeated shootings without destroying the barrel, and it would be very cost effective to operate. Now that the panama canal has been dredged to "post panamax" standards, they should dust off the Montana class battleship plans, update them, put the whole thing on a ford class aircraft carrier hull form with a few extra A1B reactors, and then give it to the marines. Armor the crap out of it to guard against conventional shipkillers, don't worry about nukes because if someone nukes your navy, it's ww-III anyways and the missiles will do the rest. You have something that could put 12 16-19" shells down range every 15 seconds, with a magazine that can't explode, and with an ammo cost of approximatly whatever a handful of scrap engine blocks costs these days per shot. I like airplanes. I like missiles because they fly, Drones are neat too. But we should be building one really expensive battleship rather than flying 30 equally expensive aircraft to do the same job at 80 times the cost.