what does the RAF have left that ..

[Bobski]

i cant help but wonder if wed kept a few battleships/battlecruiser in service the armour on them would make exocets very expensive and pretty fireworks would they not?

Potentially yes, but remember what happened to the Yamato, Musashi, Tirpitz et al. All of them were attacked and sunk from the air. Battleships and battlecruisers are great for shore bombardment but were rendered largely obsolete by the aircraft carrier. If the missiles didn't work then you could send aircraft in to bomb the ship, or send both in to overwhelm their air defences. I certainly wouldn't want to send a Battleship Battle Group up against a Carrier Battle Group.

As well as the risk of air attack, there's also the risk from torpedos. Even if the torpedo doesn't sink the ship it could well disable the ship sufficiently for it to be bombed by aircraft. Likewise, an Exocet could "miss" the armour plate of a battleship and go into the superstructure, damaging or disabling many critical systems without actually sinking the ship.

During GW1 a chinese silkworm type missile was shot at Iowa from a land based ramp but intercepted, had the interception failed we would have known for sure about the effect of such a missile.

The Iraqis fired two. One missed and the other was shot down by a Sea Dart from HMS Gloucester, which I believe was the first successful missile vs missile engagement in combat by any Navy

[Giorgio N]

The Iraqis fired two. One missed and the other was shot down by a Sea Dart from HMS Gloucester, which I believe was the first successful missile vs missile engagement in combat by any Navy

Yep, I had mentioned HMS Gloucester a few posts ago. As for this being the first missile vs. missile engagement, it depends on what actually happened in Vietnam in 1972, when USS Sterett claimed a Styx missile shot down with a Terrier. IIRC the USN did not confirm this and today experts believe that Sterett shot at a radar rather than at a missile. There's also never been any confirmation that Vietnamese units used the Styx missile (of which the silkworm is a chinese variant), so the claim is more and more disputed and the Gloucester shoot down is likely to be the first ever case.

[4scourge7]

As for current anti-ship weapons - could one use a Storm Shadow?

I wondered that too Bobski. The RAF, quite rightly, doesn`t advertise a great deal about Storm Shadows capabilities. Best guess is to compare it with older Israeli types such as Delilah and Popeye which the Israelis claim can (and have) hit time critical, moving targets. Whether SS can do the same is something no-ones confirming.

Cheers, Ian

[mrvr6]

Potentially yes, but remember what happened to the Yamato, Musashi, Tirpitz et al. All of them were attacked and sunk from the air. Battleships and battlecruisers are great for shore bombardment but were rendered largely obsolete by the aircraft carrier. If the missiles didn't work then you could send aircraft in to bomb the ship, or send both in to overwhelm their air defences. I certainly wouldn't want to send a Battleship Battle Group up against a Carrier Battle Group.

As well as the risk of air attack, there's also the risk from torpedos. Even if the torpedo doesn't sink the ship it could well disable the ship sufficiently for it to be bombed by aircraft. Likewise, an Exocet could "miss" the armour plate of a battleship and go into the superstructure, damaging or disabling many critical systems without actually sinking the ship.

The Iraqis fired two. One missed and the other was shot down by a Sea Dart from HMS Gloucester, which I believe was the first successful missile vs missile engagement in combat by any Navy

iv never said battleships/battlecruisers should be used instead of carriers but imho they are a very viable escort even if you remove the main guns from the equation (and several thousand tons?) their sheer size and armour make them very tough and very big weapons platforms coupled to modern electronics/weapons (im aware this blurs the boundries between oversized cruisers and old school batleships)

all 3 of the ships you mentioned were set upon by huge forces (yamato and musahsi took an insane amount of damage before the succumbed and tirpitz had frankly silly bombs dropped on it whilst stationary with no support at all)

every situation youv mentioned highlights my point that battleships would be VASTLY more survivable given almost any attack than the tin cans that are around now (i grasp the basics of a keel shot and would the armour belt help to massively strengthen the keel? would the armour effectively make the majority of the hull a bloody huge H section girder?)

given any situation put forward so far im convinced an oldschool type vessel would be far safer and potentially far more capable that what is actually around now

even if the ship were crippled surely youd lose less crew?

[vtecjack]

Couldn't we just use Trident ??

[pigsty]

iv never said battleships/battlecruisers should be used instead of carriers but imho they are a very viable escort even if you remove the main guns from the equation (and several thousand tons?) their sheer size and armour make them very tough and very big weapons platforms coupled to modern electronics/weapons (im aware this blurs the boundries between oversized cruisers and old school batleships)

all 3 of the ships you mentioned were set upon by huge forces (yamato and musahsi took an insane amount of damage before the succumbed and tirpitz had frankly silly bombs dropped on it whilst stationary with no support at all)

every situation youv mentioned highlights my point that battleships would be VASTLY more survivable given almost any attack than the tin cans that are around now (i grasp the basics of a keel shot and would the armour belt help to massively strengthen the keel? would the armour effectively make the majority of the hull a bloody huge H section girder?)

given any situation put forward so far im convinced an oldschool type vessel would be far safer and potentially far more capable that what is actually around now

even if the ship were crippled surely youd lose less crew?

The armour belt of a battleship was installed primarily to protect against plunging fire from battleship guns. It was, at least at first, surprisingly vulnerable to torpedos, which is why nets and add-on bulges were invented. The other element of protection for a battleship was to armour the deck, and the failure to do that in certain designs has been blamed for losses that might otherwise have been avoided. You also have to remember the principles of armour design - a long, relatively thin belt -v- the all-or-nothing style - and the concomitant need to be very careful about compartment design for sections that are more thinly armoured. The superstructure couldn't be armoured to anything like the same standard because it would make the ship unstable. Keel design wasn't linked to armour belt design in the sense that it contributed to protection. Instead, the keel was designed to be strong enough to hold the ship together in a heavy sea with a shedload of heavy armour half a beam's length away. Any protective effect would have been incidental and, at the time, not wanted, since torpedos of that period struck laterally rather than diving under the target.

The reason battleships were vulnerable to bombing is mainly, but not entirely, down to the fact that bombs drop downwards. "Plunging fire" makes it sound like the shells will be raining down from on high, but in many engagements they were actually falling at quite a shallow angle. This is why the armour belt faces sideways, not upwards. Shallow-falling shells were less likely to penetrate the deck. Bombs, on the other hand, fall at a much steeper angle, and have the advantage of the speed of the aircraft to help them along. Plus, bombing was generally more accurate, even back in WWII. And you could fit more bombs into a given time because it was easier to launch a wave of aircraft (maybe fifty separate bombs) than to fire a broadside (nine shells?) and reload.

Modern anti-ship weapons take advantage of the lack of armour and strike laterally. This is partly driven by the need to come in under the radar, and by the fact that a ship's profile is much the easiest target. If battleships were still in service now, weapon designers would have chosen a different attack route, and I imagine we'd have missiles that popped up at the last minute and fired a late booster to propel them at transonic speed through the deck or into the superstructure. And, as others have pointed out, you don't need to sink a ship to make it useless, so the warhead wouldn't need to be big enough to overcome hull strength. Something launched from, say, a Bear could still be big enough to do that with a shaped charge, but it would be more economical and more flexible to design the weapon around the target's features rather than to tackle them head-on. This is the driving force of all successful weapons design, after all.

[Giorgio N]

To add to the very good explanation from Pigsty, we should not forget that not only no ship was ever completely armoured, but no fleet was every completely armoured ! The escort units that served in WWII had no armour at all for the simple reason that armour is heavy and expensive. Armour increases weight and size and this requires more powerful engines to keep the same speed, that require more fuel to achieve the same range and so on. Armour also becomes really useful over a certain thickness, if weight consideration prevent such thickness to be used, better use no armour at all rather than carry the extra weight around.

Not that today armour isn't used, but it's very different from the steel plates used in WWII, with kevlar and other materials used to protect certain areas. This type of armour does not protect against large weapons but at least prevents ships from being put out of action by smaller weapons. True that these are all relatively recent developments and nothing of this kind was available in 1982.

Looking back at the Falklands again, in the end the two Type 21 lost succumbed to damage that would have sunk any old school ship of similar size and the same can be said for Coventry. Sheffield was lost through a combination of factors and maybe the loss of the ship could have been avoided, but the human losses incurred would have not been much less in a different ship: USS Stark lost 37 men even if it survived the attack, Glamorgan lost 13 men even if the ship reacted brilliantly to the threat and was hit in a less vulnerable area. On the other side, General Belgrano was lost to a torpedo attack with heavy loss of life even if it was a conventional all steel ship with a good armour. Does this means the ships involved were perfect ? Of course not, but against certain weapons there's little that can be done and the best defence is destroying the attacker, aircraft of submarine, before it can come close enough to launch its attack.