the Civ 3 Fleet

[Shiva]

Originally posted by ETS
Battleships:
1) Have horrible clustering of shells. Any Marine would cringe at having fire support from a BB. More likely than not to suffer damage from friendly fire!! Danger Close is so large that you would have to be on another island to be safe.

Ummm not quite. You dont have to fire every tube on said mount at once. They also have thier 5 inch secondaries. Quite a few.

Originally posted by ETS
Battleships:
2) Effectiveness of shore bombardment. Look at pictures of Tarawa after days of bombardment but before the landing. Very small island, we were just bouncing the rubble with last shells.
Then the Marines land and discover that 90% of the defenders and their equipment were undisturbed, and had to be removed, one pill box at a time.

Yes this is so however it still does not dispute that it is still far far more effective than current naval ships at firesupport and doesnt have to rtb to be rearmed like aircraft do after a short strike.

Originally posted by ETS
3) Sinking -- in WW2 it took about 6 torpedoes to kill a prepared BB. (water tight compartments isolated with DC teams active)
Modern weapons like the Mk 48 can probably do it with 1 shot.
(An explosion under the keel can break the back no matter how much armor plating and torpedo belting you have.

True, however this hold true for every ship, not just a battleship. And a battleship is still much more able to sustan damage then the thin skined modern crusiers.

Originally posted by ETS
4) The BB would need protection from a air defense network and submerged defenders to get even close to target and then be of limited use.

Once again the myth that you would have to get close to a target to attack. The Iowa class BBs mount at thier last mothballing 32x RGM-74 Tomahawks in 8 quad launchers, 16x RGM-84 Harpoons in 4 quad launchers. The tomahawk can reach out to 250mn in anti-ship. Harpoon 60nm with the Slam-ER version 150nm. And there were plans to add a new round for the main gun that could reach targets 100nm away using GPS. Close indeed.

As for needing air defense and sub defense yes this is true for all ships not just the battleship.

Originally posted by ETS
The last major unit to try to bully its way into a fight was the General Belgrano and it was a CA, but there would be little difference.

Sorry, fell out of my chair laughing. First off it was a CL (the ex-CL-46 Phoenix). Second said ship mounted no SSMs (unlike the battleships) and would be forced to close if it wanted to fight. Third sinking a ship that didnt have effective escorts and was moving away from the battle and outside the exclusion zone sure sounds easy to me.

What the navy has been doing to replace the fire support is to start a new program (if it hasnt been cancelled) ERGM. The ERGM program is a $2.1 Billion program to design, test, and field a new long-range 5 inch gun which can deliver 19 pounds of explosives at ranges out to 63 nautical miles, using GPS guidance. The program calls for fitting one gun to 28 DDG's.

This amount of money could pull 4 battleships (we have 2) out of mothballs and run them for 10 years and also pay for the 100nm rounds developement. Sure sounds like the battleships are a waste of money to me

As for not having factories to make armor that has nothing to do with battleships being effective or not. Especially ones that have already been built. In fact I really dont see anything in what you posted that show that battleships are ineffective at all.

[Shiva]

Originally posted by ETS
Battleships:

(An explosion under the keel can break the back no matter how much armor plating and torpedo belting you have.

One question. Is this a built in attack profile of the Mk48 or just luck. And if it is an attack profile does it work after the wire is broken?

[SerapisIV]

Originally posted by Shiva
What the navy has been doing to replace the fire support is to start a new program (if it hasnt been cancelled) ERGM. The ERGM program is a $2.1 Billion program to design, test, and field a new long-range 5 inch gun which can deliver 19 pounds of explosives at ranges out to 63 nautical miles, using GPS guidance. The program calls for fitting one gun to 28 DDG's.

The DDG21 and another S??21 (another future surface ship program, forgot the initials) programs are all being designed to use the new gun. I went to a mech. eng. conference last year that had a whole presentation by a gov't contracter discussing all the details of it. The program is alive and well and shows no signs of being on the chopping block. The Marines won't allow that to happen. They mourned the mothballing of the BB guns and have been begging to get a new equivalent for a long time now. The Marines in Vietnam loved the BB guns. Nothing else could deliver that kind of firepower in sustained fire, not airpower, not artillery. There was better forward observer controlling and spotting in Vietnam (communications improvements since WWII). I've never heard of a Marine complaining about the Big Boys raining hell on the enemy across from them.

[Sarxis]

Since we are on the topic of AEGIS Cruisers and Rocketry:

It seems to me that Rocketry should'nt itself allow for the AEGIS: Reason? The first rockets were really quite simple, and didn't need advanced guidance and targeting systems to hit their targets. Missiles on ships like the AEGIS are more complex, and really should come after the invention of computers.


Or something like that.