What is the best battleship in history

Technology-wise? Iowa-class.

In terms of utility? For a single ship? Tirpitz, despite possibly being the worst battleship of WW2 in a straight fight. The threat of her locked at one point no less than half of all the Royal Navy battleships plus their support and TWO of the New USN fast battleships and their task forces that were desperately needed in the Pacific at the time. No other ship's shear presence locked down as many.

did any ww2 battleship play a strategic role in proportion to the resources invested in it

yeah since there wasn't much for alternatives at the time

Again, Tirpitz.

>most effective axis battleship was a harbor queen that's design was outdated decades before she was even laid down

Funny how things work out.

Dreadnought.

>Yamato
>sexiest silhouette.
Dafuq?

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUCK!!!!

H.M.S. Victory

Vanguard

...

>armed with ww1 vintage guns

what game

In terms of effectiveness and significance in naval history, it's the Mikasa.

Definitely the cutest.

The Regina Marina was a miracle of nature.

>Not liking pagodas
>that pleb
I agree.

Probably Iowa.

in terms of impact and influence in naval warfare as a whole, the HMS Dreadnought, no contest. Even if it saw limited action in WWI, it easily advanced naval technology by 20 years with its inception alone.

best battleship built though, probably either the Yamato or the Iowa Class.

Yamato

eww no

nothing particularly evocative or special about obsolete rusting wasted materials

Hotel&Palace weren't even the best floating hotels during WW2.

This. The HMS Dreadnought.

in terms of technical capabilities probably the iowa class benefiting from being the last major class of battleship built, HMS Vanguard was superior in some aspects, notably seakeeping secondary armament and slightly better fire control when commisioned - later upgrades gave iowa the edge there. but was inferior in its main battery although the 15 inch guns were still effective weapons, spped and range were also inferior.

for actual service record probably warspite that ship saw some shit.

in terms of influence it has to be HMS Dreadnought, any warship which divides its class into pre and post types takes that prize

HOTERU
O
T
E
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All this jap crap of my state's battlehship needs to fucking go

You can admire the Iowa for being one of the most versatile and successful battleships and still marvel at the sci-fi Pagodas.
What's not to like about the beautiful, 18 inch gun armed, biggest, most armoured Battleship ever™?

My favorite are the Pre-Dreadnoughts. They're still based upon Ships of the Line, but they're in transition, slowly transforming into a butterfly.

...

This ship doesn't know whether to become a Submarine, Ship of the Line, or a Dreadnought.

When I grow up.......

>reading about some random early battleship
>low casemate guns get flooded every time
>everybody put them there anyway
why

Are you fucking retarded? Or do you not view the thread before posting? In that case you're re taar did.

It's a good example of militaries preparing for the last war they fought. Back in those days the battle line was still the be all end all of naval tactics and broadside guns like that were a known quantity. They also didn't increase the ship's profile like the top deck casemates do and they could put more of the things onto the ship and make up for the terrible accuracy of the time (1 hit/~100 shots and at absurdly long engagement distances compared to even just a few decades before) with weight of fire.

They transitioned away from them as gunnery techniques and equipment improved and they could actually reliably score a hit, so they were able to take advantage of bigger and bigger shells on top-mounted casemates like what most people think of when they picture a battleship.

The development of effective torpedoes and the proliferation of small, fast torpedo boats left battleships very vulnerable, so they needed smaller caliber guns to keep themselves safe.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much other place to put those smaller caliber guns on early dreadnoughts, so they had to make due with the less than satisfactory mounting close to the waterline.

what are those sail poles for?

Lookout posts. Radar didn't exist yet but you still needed to have a way to see distant objects. Climbing up there with binoculars was as good as it got until better methods came along.

BULLDOG OF THE NAVY

>tfw it got dragged out of museum use to be an ammo barge for WW2
feels bad man

>when even your battleships are fat

>The fastest battleship ever made is fat

Interesting thing about US battleship designs, their width had to be at least 2 feet less than that of the Panama Canal so they could still use it.

USS Texas

The Panama canal has been greatly expanded since then, but at the time the maximum width for a ship using the canal was 108 feet. The Iowa battleships just barely made it through. If you wanna have a giggle, look up the Tillman Maximum design, which was a plan to create battleships as big as they could possibly get while still being able to traverse the canal.

>design
designs, plural

and they're fucking nuts

6-gun turrets, man

>slow, abysmal aa-suite, dedicated anti-ship secondaries instead of all dp, obsolete fire control system, crew that couldn't into damage control

2/10 would send to cutters

every battleship is fat user, the yamato was 39m wide, the iowas 33m even though they were slightly longer

If we are talking about fat boats then you should be looking for fat dakotas and standards for your American examples.

itt amerishits who think the Iowa had better radars than the Yamato when it can't even detect targets that are already 3-4 km into her guns max. firing range while Yamato can detect surface targets up to 150 kilometers away

go home burgers, stereotypes and anecdotal history isn't history.

Huh looks like Jap damage control still hasn't improved at all in 70 years.

>Climbing up there with binoculars was as good as it got until better methods came along.

Samuel Francis Cody to the rescue.

Americans had a poor naval academy. Japanese actually studied tactics

who cares about DC when the Yamato can fire at Iowa for 5 fucking kilometers while she can't fucking detect her? Iowa would get fucking dickslapped in a 1v1 with Yamato, end of story for burgers who think the Iowa was somehow more advanced on the radar field.

>Japanese actually studied tactics

Too bad that they failed to implement them in any meaningful fashion and got their entire fleet gutted by yank submarines because >muh escort duty is beneath the great nipponese race.

there is no honour in American warfare. nothing but barbarians

If Japan had good RFC then the Yamato wouldn't have been taken out by planes so easily.

...

Why couldn't they afford the extra month or whatever to go around South America. As far as I know most of the navy was needed in the Pacific anyway.

Yamato was truly a disappointment. I don't see why Japs continue to glorify it.

>build your doctrine around decisive battleship clash
>your first actions during the war makes ensue that your opponents will focus on carrier and submarine warfare

Funny how 20 years was enough to turn a RN trained fighting force into a pack of stooges incapable of doing anything properly.

It was a disappointment because Japan lost most decisive assets (carriers) too early in the war, which were irreplacable, and was not supposed to happen

Perhaps they should had gone and focused on damage control training and equipment so that they wouldn't had lost perfectly usable carriers to shit like near misses or 1 bomb.

Japanese battleships had shitty aesthetics, poor functionality, were shit strategically and were easily destroyed. They shouldn't even be talked about in this thread.

>near misses or 1 bomb

You realize this never happened, right? You also do realize how sensitive carriers are no matter how good their damage control is? USS Princeton was literally sunk by a single 500 kg bomb from a lone D4Y Judy that attacked her in daylight and escaped safely

t. Cletus

Kongos - obsolete WW1 battlecruisers that nips tried to pass off as fast battleships
Fusos & Ises - useless turret farms that should had been scrapped decades ago
Nagatos - probably the only decent Japanese battleship class
Yamatos - made perfectly fine hotels for IJN's brass but other than that they're shit

Akagi was sunk after just a single bomb strike and two near misses - it burned until it was abandoned.

And sure, Japanese carriers may have been hilariously flimsy, being effectively destroyed after just a couple hits, but American fleet carriers most definitely weren't.

>b-but the Princeton
The Princeton was a light carrier, and light carriers sacrificed just about every aspect of usefulness - including damage control - for the sake of speed of production.

How about we look at an actual USN Fleet carrier?

Lexington:
>two torpedo strikes
>two direct bomb strikes
>15 flooding near-misses
>remained combat capable until the battle was over
And it was only scuttled because the damage had shut down her machinery.

Or even better - the Yorktown:
>One deep-penetrating bomb strike at Coral Sea
>Hasty repairs, rushed into service at Midway
>Three more direct bomb hits
>retained combat capability
>two torpedo hits
>ship crippled but kept afloat
>only sunk after a sub caught it being towed back to port with a skeleton crew aboard

Japanese damage control was hilariously shit.

Meanwhile in Japan
>taiho gets hit by a single torpedo
>sinks 6 hours later due to an explosive fart caused by bad damage control practices and shit design

>akagi was sunk by a single bomb strike

you mean atleast 6 hits from 1,000kg bombs while a large complement of her aircraft were on-board refuelling and re-arming and her entire magazine was exposed? you realize she spent 3 hours in the water after all this happened?

>The Princeton was a light carrier, and light carriers sacrificed just about every aspect of usefulness - including damage control - for the sake of speed of production
>but muh lexington
>muh yorktown

Ok, let's talk about the big girls

>USS wasp: sunk by two torpedoes from a sub
>USS Lexington: sent to bottom by two torpedoes and two 250 kiggers
>uss franklin, the might of the American navy, was almost sunk by a 251 kigger by a single D3A/D4Y that also escaped safely

Meanwhile in America

>Wasp gets hit by two Torpedoes
>Burns and sink after two hours

Taiho was literally crewed by a bunch of drafted kiddies and farmer peasants, her officers fucked up and did a wrong decision by turning on the internal venitlation system which simply spread fuel vapor more across the interior, this is not a "shit damage control" practice, this is a brainfart by the officers in charge.

>suffers both a fuel & ammo explosion while in middle of the enemy territory
>still manages to limb it back to the us east coast

Seems like a pretty good sign that US damage control knew what they're doing.

>US damage control knows what they're doing
>Fleet carrier narrowly avoids sinking after over one thousand of her compliment dies from a single 251kg bomb
>multiple ships have to park next to her to help firefighting, sustaining damage in the process
>it didn't limb anywhere, it got towed away
>muh damage control hurrdurrino

>you mean atleast 6 hits from 1,000kg bombs
1 hit from a 500kg bomb and two near misses from a 500kg bomb.

> no one has shilled for the Bismarck yet

Tbh only butthurt Brits and wehraboos remember that she existed.

Meanwhile HMS Illustrious was hit with: 1 2000lb bomb, 3 1000lb bombs, 3 500lb bombs, numerous near misses and several smaller bombs.
And made it into port under her own power.

t. under-educated swine trying to argue

these were the hits by the 2nd dive bomber attack, faggot. The first one scored 4 hits

"Twenty-eight dive bombers from Enterprise, led by C. Wade McClusky, began an attack on Kaga, hitting her with at least four bombs. At the last minute, one of McClusky's elements of three bombers from VB-6, led by squadron commander Richard Best who deduced Kaga to be fatally damaged, broke off and dove simultaneously on Akagi"

The 2nd wave in your shitty picture came 6 minutes later and scored a hit with two near misses. This ship stayed afloat for 3 hours despite being hit with her ass exposed (arms and fuel were all on-board, aircraft were on-board, this is the worst possible state for a carrier to get bombed in)

Your choice to pick out Akagi because she was the one who took the least hits during the battle to try to leverage an argument has failed, since you selectively left out the Kaga and Soryu which both took a fuckton of damage (Kaga took something like 6 bombs while she was in the same state as the Akagi and her fire suppression systems were put out of action but she stayed afloat for 4-5 hours).

The only damage control here is the one in your brain.

It was only a significant battleship in the particular theater in which it operated. It had fewer and weaker main guns than American battleships, and lacked dual-purpose secondary guns.

On the flipside, Ark Royal was hit and sunk by a single torpedo, Courageous went under from two.

>The 2nd wave in your shitty picture
That is the VB-6 attack, maybe you have some torpedo attacks mixed up?

What exactly are you getting at? Akagi was only hit with a single bomb. The damage to the IJN fleet carriers at Midway was:

Akagi
>1 direct hit, 1,000lb bomb
>2 near miss, 1,000lb bomb

Kaga
>4 direct hits, 500lb bomb
>1 direct hit, 1,000lb bomb

Soryu
>3 direct hits, 1,000lb bomb

Hiryu
>2 direct hits, 1,000lb bomb
>2 direct hits, 500lb bomb

Though that's nothing to shake a stick at in its own right, the horrendous state of Japanese damage control definitely contributed to the loss of all four ships. At both Midway and Coral Sea, the American fleet carriers were taking similar damage and retaining combat capability until the battle was completely over, while the Japanese carriers were out of the battle after their first hit.

>Akagi
>1 direct hit, 1,000lb bomb
>2 near miss, 1,000lb bomb

I'm fucking done, t. cletus

nope, the torpedo wings were all gunned down by AA before they even entered torpedo range, Akagi was hit by two dive bomber wings, the first scored atleast 5 bomb hits on her and multiple near-misses, the 2nd wing scored a hit and 2 near misses, the poster is a faggot with 0 education and muhjpegifoundongoogle.xd

Surely you have some sources that back up your claims, right? Because literally everything readily available is saying otherwise.

>a weaboo is getting this triggered when it turned out that his akagi waifu was a shitty conversion

One really shouldn't try to wank up a navy that lost a ship just because they decided that it would be a great idea to send a carrier out to the submarine infested sea without making sure that she had all of her bulkheads installed.

While you're correct about the bomb hits I find it doubtful that any damage control could've saved her.

>At approximately 10:26, the three bombers hit her with one 1,000-pound (450 kg) bomb and just missed with two others. The first near-miss landed 5–10 m (16–33 ft) to port, near her island. The third bomb just missed the flight deck and plunged into the water next to the stern. The second bomb, likely dropped by Best, landed at the aft edge of the middle elevator and detonated in the upper hangar. This hit set off explosions among the fully armed and fueled B5N torpedo bombers that were being prepared for an air strike against the American carriers, resulting in an uncontrollable fire.[86][Note 7]

>At 10:29, Captain Aoki ordered the ship's magazines flooded. The forward magazines were promptly flooded, but the aft magazines were not due to valve damage, likely caused by the near miss aft. The ship's main water pump also appears to have been damaged, greatly hindering fire fighting efforts. On the upper hangar deck, at 10:32 damage control teams attempted to control the spreading fires by employing the one-shot CO2 fire-suppression system. Whether the system functioned or not is unclear, but the burning aviation fuel proved impossible to control, and serious fires began to advance deeper into the interior of the ship. At 10:40, additional damage caused by the near-miss aft made itself known when the ship's rudder jammed 30 degrees to starboard during an evasive maneuver.[89]

No fucking damage control will ever save a CV from getting hit with aerial bombs while she refuels and re-arms aircraft on-board, period.

Well yeah - the issues went beyond just poor damage control crews. Japanese ships in general were pretty poorly designed when it came to damage control, and their operational practices usually left their ships very vulnerable to catastrophic damage like the Akagi suffered.

Most of the Japanese boats were thoroughly poorly designed so pointing out that they're poorly designed for damage control is pretty pointless.

They were the best of their time. Yamato would hate totalled Iowa 1v1

Illustrious was a post-treaty CV. Pre-treaty CVs were uniformly shit no matter who made them, given that they were mostly experimental.

A post-treaty CV that sacrificed some of its aircraft carrying capacity for an ability mount decent enough amount of armor.

#
#
Are you a fucking idiot? Have you not studied the Battle of Midway? There was never another dive bomber attack besides the later attack in the day on Hiryuu. The 3 bomb hits on Akagi came from the 3 bombers that broke off from McClusky's group. It's right there on your fucking source.
>At the last minute, one of McClusky's elements of three bombers from VB-6, led by squadron commander Richard Best who deduced Kaga to be fatally damaged, broke off and dove simultaneously on Akagi"
Read # this again. The bomb hit on Akagi was done by Richard Best who was in the same wave.

>I don't see why Japs continue to glorify it.

Because it was the biggest ship that had the biggest guns.

It's really hard to shill for a battleship that died during it's first mission, but I'll give it a shot:

The Bismark had 3 important things going for it. The first is compartmentation. The Bismark was excellently compartmented in a way that made it very easy to seal off damaged areas of the ship. This is why it took so damn long for the thing to sink. The other big advantage is purely the size of the ship. The Bismark and its sisters were the biggest battleship ever constructed in Europe. And size matters when it comes to battleships. More space inside the hull makes it easier to absorb damage taken during battle, which is again part of why it took so damn long for the thing to sink. The final advantage for the Bismark is speed. 30 knots is a very respectable top speed for a battleship.

Carriers need more love. They have remained relevant far longer than battleships did yet receive far less discussion.

Not the guy you're responding to, but I think one of the reason that the carriers get relatively little discussion is that ultimately, the CV is a big box to carry your planes around. I don't see it so much here, but on other communities I've seen quite a bit of discussion for this, that and the other carrier planes.