Interesting, I wonder if the USN is trying to get the funding for this. As a
layman, I would guess they could easily reduce crew requirements by half as
well as designing the defences for the greatest protection in modern air
combat.
Neath Southern Skies -http://home.pacific.net.au/~southernskies/
[MKW2] Admiral Peter Rollins - Task Force Zulu-Beta
[Firestorm] Battletech PBeM GM
> -----Original Message-----
--- "Robertson, Brendan"
> <Brendan.Robertson@dva.gov.au> wrote:
Pet Peeve Alert: No, the USN is not delusional enough
to think they could shove multi-billion-dollar
"battleships" through Congress. Maybe if there was
another true large blue-water Navy that could actually
go a couple rounds in the ring with the USN (Love you Brits, the RN is real
good. But it's really, really small. Ditto the French.) But right now the USN
is going to be lucky to keep all their current procurement programs (the SSN
that's supposed to be
follow-on to Seawolf, CVNX, continued DDG-51
procurement, and the various aircraft acquisition programs) without muddying
the waters.
> "Robertson, Brendan" wrote:
> Interesting, I wonder if the USN is trying to get the funding for
The insurmountable problem of trying to get Congress to give the Navy enough
money to build a new class of battleships is that the Navy must explain what
these ships will do and why nothing currently available will accomplish the
task. There is nothing for a modern, big gunned battleship to do and no reason
to have the capabilities to even sink one, let alone build it.
A working definition for a cruiser is a vessel capable of independent
operations (powerful enough to destroy small vessels and durable enough to
flee in the face of overwhelming numbers). There is no analogy to ASW in Full
Thrust, and no ship is impervious to the smaller weapons, so FT only has roles
for fighters (which need to gang up to destroy anything), scouts, torpedo
boats, torpedo boat
destroyers, anti-fighter escorts, cruisers and carriers. BC's, BB's,
BDN's, and SDN's all fall into the category of "super cruisers". They are all
larger than
cruisers, and they have more and/or larger guns, but tonne for tonne
they are no more capable than cruisers.
A "true" battleship has an absolute immunity to the guns carried destroyers or
lesser vessels, is only vulnerable to a cruisers weapons at very short ranges,
and there exists (for wet navy BB's that had to float) a range band where the
heavy guns of an opposing BB can neither pierce the armored belt nor the
armored
deck. An off-the-cuff way for FT'ers to appreciate BB's is if you allow
ships to up to one row of armor for every 50 pts of mass (at the same armor
cost,
rounding fractions DOWN), K-guns have the same cost as beams, the range
bands
for K-guns are 4+2xclass, you introduce a penalty for firing big guns at
little
> Richard and Emily Bell wrote:
I would like to apologise for writing a beginning and end, but not a middle.
> "Robertson, Brendan" wrote:
So take
> > > em with a grain of salt. It might be 4 Nimitz's, or 6. It might be
For a Nimitz sized vessel, the minimum crewing requirement is about 50 plus
the number of people needed to run a 250 megawatt powerplant ( I would bet on
bot less than a thousand) and another unspecified number of people to operate
and maintain the weapons. The vessel would require as much steel as nearly 10
Aegis cruisers, and there is very little that the battleship could do that the
ten cruisers could not do better. The heavy armor of an Iowa is proof against
a lot of weapons, but
the last generation of soviet anti-ship missiles will do a significant
amount of damage, even if it does not sink. A tomohawk land attack missile is
more expensive
than a 16" shell + propellant, but 200 T-LAM's are cheaper than the
infrastructure to deliver 200 16" shells to a target, and the missiles are
more accurate and have a longer range.
FT does not have the problem of finding a use for a battleship, it has the
opposite problem that battleships are very useful, but impossible to build
(i.e. there are no "true" battleships in FT).
> A working definition for a cruiser is a vessel capable of independent
> Richard Bell wrote:
> BC's, BB's, BDN's, and SDN's all fall into the category of "super
Not exactly. Tonne for tonne (and point for point) Full Thrust capital ships
*are* more capable than cruisers, due to the way the game mechanics work.
They're not as overwhelming to their smaller foes as their WW2 and earlier
equivalents were, but they still pack more punch per Mass and per Cost.
Regards,