What was the exact year that battleships became obsolete?

>there was not a single offensive
Successful* accidentally a word

Naval gunfire is never obsolete

Makes me wonder why the US marines can't crew one and use it for support or something. They'd probably have mad wicked range and survivability with retrofits. I vaguely recall them wanting a battleship or something anyway.

Because there's literally no point. You can operate a missile cruiser for a fraction of the cost with a fraction of the crew for the exact same effect.

b-but it's not as cool

>raining hellfire and damnation in the form of a missile isn't as cool as using an outdated rustbucket

Remind me again. How many CV were sunk by BB? Compared to how many BB were sunk by CVP?

A 406 mm shell flying some 70 kilometers is pretty cool senpai

>A 406 mm shell flying some 70 kilometers
Why not a missile with double or triple the payload flying a thousand kilometers with an inaccuracy of a few meters (generally less than a foot, but a few meters is a better margin of error) rather than a few dozen.

They use amphibious assault ships and stuff. Battleships have come out of favor because more specialized types of ships emerged

I'm an artilleryfag ;~;

FCT is FCT

I dunno what you are talking about.

But I do know that the US Navy once planned to have what is called an "Arsenal Ship." Which is a missile cruiser the size of a battleship that could carry hundreds of VLS systems.

Because machinery on Iowa class BB's is outdated as fuck.
Artillery is more cost-effective than missiles. Like 100 times more cost effective. Hence why this didn't caught up yet Navy/congress cling to keeping Iowa and Wisconsin prepared for yet another refit and modernisation.

Well arsenal ships have some other problems like being huge sitting ducks filled with enormously expensive weaponry while doing what few submarines would do - except submarines would be relatively invisible and safe, but cost-effectiveness is the main problem with arsenal ships. Artillery delivers more explosives per dollar and the accuracy with the 80's FCS those BB's have was actually very very good.

Missiles cost more, yes. Cruisers cost far less to operate than a battleship does. When you add on the fact that a cruiser can be operated by a crew less than half the size of a battleship, the cost difference grows even larger. Your point is moot.

It's obvious, we copy the Russians but put bigger guns on the boats.

>Cruisers cost far less to operate than a battleship does.
Yearly operational costs of Iowa class Battleship post their 1980's refit was lower than yearly operational cost of single Arleigh-Burke DD

Depends what you consider obsolescence, really.

Arguably, the battleship remained relevant, if reduced in importance, even at the end of WW2 because surface engagements between ships were still a possibility. Sure, they were being eclipsed by carriers, but they were still a potent weapon in the absence of airpower.

As an anti-shipping asset, they stopped being relevant once anti-ship missiles started coming into service in the '60s. Sure, you could still throw cruise missiles on them, but they end up wasting a lot of tonnage with the big guns that have a comparatively short engagement range.

They remained a potent coastal support weapon at the very least into the '60s - you had battleships providing artillery support for ground troops in Vietnam.

If you're in a situation where using these warships is justified then cost doesn't even matter at that point.

The Iowas were only kept in service because Raygun wanted his "200-ship Navy," so they were bringing everything back into service. Plus, the Iowas were seen as a hard counter to the Kirovs the Soviets were putting into service.

The reality was that the modernization efforts we did to keep them in service made them only slightly more effective than the Oliver Hazard Perry-class Frigates that they served alongside. This was all while being massively more expensive to man and maintain and generally being a pain in the ass to serve aboard.

So how does modern naval warfare even play out? I mean there haven't been any good examples right? Can't missiles be shot over continents and shit now? How would it look?

I thought, and this goes back even to WW2, that cruisers were better shore bombardment platforms than battleships.

I mean, for most targets on land, the difference between a 6" gun and a 16" gun is fairly academic, if the naval gun hits you, you're in for a real bad day. Add to that the shallower draft of cruisers and their ability to get closer to the target, means that they're better than the battleship, despite the smaller guns.

A 16 inch shell is going to do a lot more damage than a 6-inch, though, particularly against hardened targets. If you absolutely have to turn a beach into a hellish moonscape, I'd prefer the 16-inchers over the 6-inch.

You're right though - for all practical purposes there isn't too much of a difference.

Mitchell's test was rigged as hell. Aircraft of the 20s had no chance in hell in hitting a moving target.

>I thought, and this goes back even to WW2, that cruisers were better shore bombardment platforms than battleships.
Only in Europe where shallower drafts near the coast let cruisers get in closer. In the PTO battleships could creep up as close as cruisers did.

somewhere on or before December 7th 1941

MIdway

...that can't fucking be T34 turret on a fishing boat...

r-right?

Not a day, but I would say either 1957 or 1959, when two major Soviet anti-ship missiles first came into service which outranged battleships with extraordinary ease.

>Only in Europe where shallower drafts near the coast let cruisers get in closer
Europe isn't the only place with shallow coasts. Pretty much all of the Indian Ocean has extremely shallow harbors/coasts. Shallow keels are part of what made the dhow a dhow.

It is. River monitors tend to use whatever armament you have laying around, and there was a shit ton of T-34 turrets available.

You had the same thing happening with trains - there were tons of armored trains with tank turrets on them.

Something about armored trains intrigues me

Yeah but there wasn't a whole lot of fighting in the Indian Ocean.

Were armored trains ever used in combat or ever attacked from the ground? Seems like it would be far easier to just attack the tracks when the train isn't there.

>I vaguely recall them wanting a battleship or something anyway.
Probably because they wanted to blow one up in a weapons test.

Yes, actually. You had armored trains fighting in the Russian Civil War, and there's at least one instance in the Crimea in 1941 where the Russians used one to hold a town until Stukas knocked it out.

Also, armored trains were used for air defense a lot on the Eastern Front - you'd have a car covered in AA guns and armor to fend off train-hunting bombers.

Interesting. This is the first I've ever heard of armored trains being involved in combat.

>it would be far easier to just attack the tracks
They weren't usually used to spearhead attacks, rather as a support weapon against opponents that lacked artillery/armor themselves. They were especially useful in the Russian civil war because not only didn't they have tanks at the times, but railways were also the only reliable way of transporting things throughout Russia.
A similar war was the Boer war, which also saw armoured trains in use. Famously during the siege of Mafeking, the British were besieged by the Boers, who had however forgotten to tear up the tracks leading into the town. Baden-Powell(who would later be the founder of the boy scouts) led an attack by armoured train full of sharpshooters, choo-choo'd right into the Boer camp, fucked shit up, and then presumably laughed all the way back to Mafeking.

Agreee - armoured trains look comfy as fuck.

youtube.com/watch?v=SLZ20DjPHgg

2:05 shows the use of an armored train against Soviet partisans during WW2. Probably staged though, don't know if it's authentic

The Germans used armoured trains in the invasion of the Netherlands.

>nobody needs a gun in a fighter
This is the worst meme.
The US Navy F-4s, without guns, had no issues in Vietnam. It was the USAF that gave us le nogunz meme.

>interdiction works
Worked pretty well in Kuwait. The Iraqis were so starved for resources that they couldn't even feed their men by the time the ground war began.

>nobody needs a gun in a fighter
USN Phantoms consistently had higher kill/loss ratios in Vietnam despite never mounting a gun on the Phantom. Meanwhile, the USAF Phantom variants to carry a gun still ended up getting the majority of their victories with AIM-7s.

>multi-role platform for EVERYTHING will worka s it worked great with F-111 already
Seems to be working pretty well, actually. And an example of a half-century old aircraft designed to contradictory requirements isn't exactly a good analog for today.

>bombers are more precise than guns
An SDB has a smaller CEP than a gun run does.

The gun may have not had a big effect on overall kill rates but there were still quite a few times when a Phantom got into a situation where it would have been very nice to have a gun as an option. In these instances, the Phantom pilot would usually be forced to retreat, using F-4's afterburner as a way to disengage and escape.

The point is that the effect of a gun on the overall performance of a fighter is negligible in the age of guided missiles.

In Vietnam, with fairly poor quality AAMs, guns were already at the point where they weren't necessary. Recently, with the massive improvements in AAMs, guns have become even more redundant. The vast majority of air-to-air kills in the Gulf War, for example, were with missiles. IIRC, you can count the number of gun kills in that war on one hand.

guns and the ammo and subsystems required for operation take up space and weight that would be better served used by more fuel.

>trusting debbildawgs with anything that isn't on the same complexity level as a rifle

>Makes me wonder why the US marines can't crew one and use it for support or something. They'd probably have mad wicked range and survivability with retrofits.

Because it would cost a lot of money to do so. We no longer have a factory for gun barrels of that size. They have to be replaced every 290 rounds. There is far cheaper shore bombardment options.

I would say that it would be the year 1960.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-15_Termit

When you have something like that on destroyers big guns just are not needed for ship to ship combat. In a shore bombardment role they were overtaken shorty before the Korea war by carriers.

Naval gunfire support is of limited use these days, when we can have far better precision with air-dropped munitions (precision being especially important now that 99% of warfare is asymmetrical these days). And, unless your "battleship" could also multi-role as an AA and ASW ship, you'd need it to be escorted like a carrier anyway, which is obviously expensive. And even if a "heavy coastal bombardment platform" was called for, any existing battleships are too outdated. Not only are they in relatively poor condition, requiring rebuilds to be battle worthy, the technology is pretty outdated too. I mean, pretty much no modern ships even use oil-fired steam turbines anymore, everything is gas turbine/diesel/nuclear these days. And old battleships were ridiculously manpower intensive. Designing a completely new ship would make much more sense for the role you're talking about.

>Aircraft of the 20s had no chance in hell in hitting a moving target.
Even with torpedoes? Even in WWII torpedoes had to be released at such low altitudes that aiming didn't require any special equipment.

>Seems like it would be far easier to just attack the tracks when the train isn't there.
This has nothing to do with ARMORED trains of course, but I'm pretty sure I've seen gun camera footage from WWII where pilots aimed at the trains themselves, not the tracks. I think the reasoning is that tracks are easily repaired, it's much more costly to lose a train (and whatever valuable cargo it might be carrying). And I think some of the armored trains even carried tools and equipment to repair damaged tracks for precisely that reason.

>Even with torpedoes? Even in WWII torpedoes had to be released at such low altitudes that aiming didn't require any special equipment.
Early aerial torpedoes were launched at nearly stall speed of bombers and had to be dropped at very low altitudes. Torpedo bombing in the 1920s was not practical at all.

1916, the last time any Battleship fulfilled it's role, which was to act as the primary force in a naval engagement with an enemy fleet.

After that Treaty limitations stagnated Battleship development as they massively exceeded the tonnage limit. WW2 quickly exampled with Pearl Harbour, Bismarck and Tirpitz that the days of Battleships being the symbol of a nations naval force were long gone, and that carriers were the new flagships. After the war, it was even more obvious how irrelevant the large amounts of armour and firepower of a Battleship was in face of aircraft and soon missiles.

>1916, the last time any Battleship fulfilled it's role
>what is Calabria
>what is Denmark Strait
>What is Cape Matapan

Just because Jutland was the only all-out battle between battleship fleets doesn't mean that there weren't engagements between fleets led by battleships in WW2.

Battle of the Denmark strait is really the only relevant one there, Calabria the Battleships were next to useles and Cape Matapan was just an absolute stomp because of radar.

Even then, the Bismarck was ultimately sunk by biplane torpedo bombers.

1921

The year that the U.S Navy sunk the Iowa, Frankfurt, and Ostfriesland with aircraft bombs.

From that point onward, aircraft carriers proved a vastly superior means of force projection.

>Torpedo bombing in the 1920s was not practical at all.
Not him:
While of limited practicality, would the qualified successes of the Swordfish [A 1930s design, but by all accounts obsolete.] not demonstrate a limited degree of practicality, especially against the ships of the time?

There was during the outbreak of WWI. The German IO fleet was famously stuck at Lindi.

Not really. Battleships are completely irrelevant in naval warfare due advanced anti-ship weaponry, and are irrelevant in coastal warfare for mostly the same reasons, in that surgical precision from smaller guns has the same effect (especially with the kinds of forces America goes up against now). The reason the battleships were reinstated was because the Marines were butthurt and are slow as fuck to adapt to the change in the way war is conducted and acted scared that they wouldn't be as protected with smaller ships in support.

It's been stated above, but the only reason the US kept battleships for as long as they did was because Reagan wanted to display the wealth and size of the US military. By the gulf war it was clear that cruise missiles (carried by virtually any size ship: destroyers, cruisers, submarines) were the next step while battleships remained slow and huge targets. The modern destroyer is quickly becoming the go-to surface vessel of choice for most navies and will probably prove itself to be the best multi role class of ship.