>Slow
>Heavy
>Expensive
>Can't turn
>Easily taken out by torpedo boats or aircraft
>Guns are so big, they take forever to reload
Were battleships a mistake?
Jackson Cruz
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Landon Perry
Pretty much. They were primarily designed for a sort of war that tended not to actually happen very often, nor be decisive when it did. Contrary to Mahan's assertions, control of the sea is more often decided by ability to project force widely, not deeply. Battleships were so rarely worth the amount of resources necessary to contstruct them, that it would be impossible to justify their actual employment, and you see a lot of their use was sitting around in port attempting to intimidate an adversary rather than fight real war.
Noah Stewart
Consider this scenario. Assume this takes place in the early 1900's. You're an aspiring naval power. You have a rival power who you expect to be at war with a some point in the future. You decide NOT to build any battleships, whereas your rival does decide to build them. What now? You're pretty much fucked because the rival power can just roll up his battleships and shell your coastal cities with impunity. Either that, or he'll just blockade you and then you can't do anything at all.
Zachary Jenkins
This, it was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I would say for the most part lighter cruisers and destroyers were the way to go, but you had better have a few battleships on hand.
Tyler Cooper
>What now? You're pretty much fucked because the rival power can just roll up his battleships and shell your coastal cities with impunity.
No, because coastal emplacements were extremely tough to beat, and would remain so until airpower (possibly carrier air power) rendered them obsolete. You can count the number of times that a fleet sailed into or at an enemy port to attack either facilities or the fleets inside on one hand; it was an insanely risky operation. Think of the naval aspect of the Gallipoli campaign, and that was just trying to get up the Dardanelles, nevermind the heavier defenses around Constantinople that was the alleged objective to start shelling.
>Either that, or he'll just blockade you and then you can't do anything at all.
Unless you have a tiny coast a la Germany, it's ridiculously hard to mount an effective blockade. The biggest navy in the world, the RN, had 62 battleships and 10 battlecruisers at the start of WW1. Even ignoring things like operational range and costs of keeping the fleet at sea, imagine trying to blockade the U.S. east coast against no resistance whatsoever. The Atlantic Coast is some 2,069 miles long, and the gulf coastline adds another 1,631 miles. Assuming you want to cover it all evenly, you have 1 capital ship per 51.38 miles of coast. You won't even SEE most of the shit going through, let alone stop it. True, most nations don't have a coast length the size of the U.S., but most navies don't have the resources of the RN either.
Assuming a hypothetical naval war of two roughly even powers, well, the odds of it being decisive at all in the early 20th century aren't good at all. And it certainly won't be won by a grand, Mahanian naval clash. The closest you get to that is Tsushima, and even that was badly overshadowed in scale by land battles like Mukden.
Elijah Hill
>build submarines instead of battleships
>it's the early 1900s, so sonar and air support haven't emerged as hard counters against subs
>troll your adversary's fleet to death from beneath the waves
Ian Hill
Probably go for building one or two, but not going overboard with it and knowing when to stop.
Best example is the Southamerican Dreadnough race.
Chile and Argentina were the primary naval powers, both on a path to a confrontation that would naturally have been fought out mostly at sea, but both were not willing to go for dreadnoughts.
Then Brazil bought one and suddenly became a major naval power just like that. Argentine had to follow as self-proclaimed leading south-american power (while explicitely stating that it was not intended to be ever used against Chile), at which point Chile alone couldnt allow herslef to be left behind and went for dreadnoughts as well, at which argentine now had to buy multiple dreadnoughts, at which Brazil and Chile were forced to follow.....
and at the end all three had thrown all their wealth into a completely pointless arms race and went bankrupt.
Brandon Sanders
They look pretty fucking cool though.
Austin Moore
Early submarines were utter shit. Extremely slow, with painfully limited range, and only able to stay underwater for a short period of time. It wasn't until the advent of nuclear power that submarines started being really useful.
Brandon Morgan
>WW2 had nuclear submarines
Or are you going to try to claim they weren't useful then? I mean, in addition to actually being effective convoy attackers, they actually killed more fleet carriers, the REAL capital ship of WW2, than battleships did.