People constantly go on about reactivating the iowas and making battleships but honestly wouldn't a modernized large cruiser be a better fit for a lot of the roles people bring up? Sure it's not as big as a BB but that would probably be a benefit keeping costs and crew size down. Still plenty big to fit all the missiles you could want. Keeping say a twin or triple auto loading 12 inch on the bow and following one of the old talos or terrier conversions would give you a nasty anti air platform and capable of providing similar gunfire support to a 16 inch armed ship. She'd also easily be able to fit our incoming hypersonics or anything else we thought about shoving in those XXXL sized VLS cells. Would be a good centerpiece for a fleet as the iowas were and free up carriers to do actual strike missions or get refitted in yards.
Yes, this is what the "Trump class" is. Or were you talking about actually reactivating a ship that was cut into scrap over 60 years ago? That would be difficult.
>>65082608The 'large Cruisers' had operating costs close to that of an actual BB, which is why they ended up in mothballs and scrapped while teh BBS got reactivated.That being said, yes a large missile cruiser is what you want, if you want a big surface combatant. One per carrier battle groups would be cool, but given the USN's history of abject failures in developing surface ships for the past 40 years, I'm not exactly holding my breath.
>>65082749We will track down every dishwasher, knife, computer, car, gun, and neutron generator she's been distributed in and rebuild her
>>65082608If your gun can't fire to 150km, it's suicidal to use. A 2500-2700fps mv 12" gun is as suicidal as a 4-6" gun, but you have to build a ship around it.You can't do that with just ballistics. 4500-5500fps mv like a Paris gun only gets you about 130km. You can probably get an extra 10-15% through a more aerodynamic projectile, but you're going to need some way of generating lift or thrust to approach missile ranges.72-inches is the upper limit for shell handling length on a ship. So a 4.5 cal 16", 6 cal 12" or a 9 cal 8". I believe you can cheat spin stabilization which becomes tricky after 7-cal iirc with subcaliber rounds, but nevertheless.
