Why did the practice of boarding enemy ships to capture them (instead of just sinking them) die out...

Why did the practice of boarding enemy ships to capture them (instead of just sinking them) die out? Newer warships can cost upwards of several million dollars. That would fetch a hefty prize if you captured one reasonable intact.

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Super cannons got invented nigga

This along with the fact that a ship from a different nation would have controls and buttons n shit in a different language.

>try to board ship
>get btfo by machine guns and rifle fire

So? Even after cannons were invented, it was still a pretty common practice to board enemy warships to capture them. Cannons were just used to disorient the defending crew before boarding took place.

Nah nigga I'm talking out dem supah gigano cannons that were on battleships n shit

Sneak aboard during the night.

>Armor plating designed to stop missiles and AP shells
>locking hermetic bulkhead doors
>boarding party that can carry a blowtorch at most

You connect the dots nigga.

You realize that the crew is on rotation and there isn't really a night in which the whole ship is sleeping right?

Also modern warships needed hundreds of men to operate it. If you need to say capture the Yamato, you'd need too many men that not only can fight in close quarters but operate the ship.

It was easier to just put single guy in a plane with a bomb and drop it down the smoke stack.

Late Modern warships (1950 - 2000) rarely have armor. Early modern warships (1900 - 1950) often possess armor, but you could still carry breaking charges to get through bulkheads.

> breaching charge through 16 inches of tempered armor steel

Nigga...

Hmmm....what if you used the same landing craft used to put soldiers on beaches? I bet you could capture the Yamato that way. And it would have been worth it, too. Just imagine what you could do with 70,000 tons of steel.

Are you implying shift work hasn't been implemented on ships? Ships never go to sleep

Do you actually have any idea about ship design? Do you realize that every single modern ship has especially designed killzones in the EXTREMELY unlikely event of a boarding? There is a simple rule. It takes far less men to defend a position than to attack it.

Okay, here me out. Once upon a time, there was a group of terrorists that took over a theater. They had the entire place strapped with bombs, so it was impossible for police to get inside without killing all the hostages. You know what they did? The army came and secretly pumped some kind of sleeping gas into the theater so that all the bad guys would fall asleep. I think you could use a similar technique to board a warship. Just covertly pump some sleeping gas into the ship's ventilation system, wait a few hours, and then sneak aboard while the crew is incapacitated!

>sail an open top garbage truck towards a literal forest of guns

The Yamato battleship was like a God for the Japanese Navy. Yeah, it been a bitch to take her, but imagine how demoralizing it would be for the Japanese to see the Yamato get taken over.

Don't be dense.

Implying the Japs wouldn't have scuttled her, like so many of their submarines just to avoid capture. Remember those were the people who trained kids to strap bombs to themselves and jump under invading american tanks

And you know what else happened then? A lot of hostages died of involuntary vomit inhalation as a result of the gas. Also a battleship is no theater.

Because the engagement range in naval battles has increased far more than the speed of ships.

Like in WWI, battleships could move around 25mph, but had guns with an average range of 14 mile. So even moving at full speed right at a stationary foe, you'd be exposed to cannon fire for more than half an hour before being able to ram and board the enemy ship. It's just not worth it.

>So? Even after cannons were invented, it was still a pretty common practice to board enemy warships to capture them. Cannons were just used to disorient the defending crew before boarding took place.

I bet this was the logic of the Feudal Japanese in the naval battles of the Imjin war while their ships were shelled to bits by Korean and Chinese naval gunnery.

It never died.

Unironicaly though warships can fire over miles. Good luck closing that gap in time.

Ancient warships were buoyant enough that they could still be boarded and captured even after taking serious damage from ramming and the like.
You can't do that with a modern steel battleship.

A seven million dollar warship is rather useless when you consider that you don't have spare parts for any of the machinery inside.

You can still scrap it for metal and useful electronic components.

>A seven million dollar warship
doesn't exist
modern destroyers cost almost half a billion a pop

You say that with irony but its actually quite true with the chinese junk ships. They would compartmentalize their ships and would have flooded regions to stabalize their ships and make it immune to sinking (unless you literally blow it up)

The amount of men you would lose boarding an enemy ship would make it completely not worth it.

Superior navigation

You have literally no chance getting near the thing. It could only work only against neutralized vessels and it'll still be bullshit.

You're kidding right?

I don't know why but your post made me realize something. Imagine how savage and bloody modern boarding would be in modern warfare. Having an entire fire fight in these tiny, cramped steel hallways. Every kill would pretty much be up close so you'd see the face off the guy you just riddled with bullets every time. Gunshots in such an enclosed area would cause your ears to ring throughout the whole boarding making communication near impossible. Nobody can hear what command want so the whole operation is a mess from start to finish and lack of information and conflicting reports would probably result in friendly fire.

Kind of glad we just shell each other from miles away now.

There's still the problem of closing that engagement range. Maybe due some weird shit like sending out dinghys in the night with gas? Still seems retarded but I appreciate your ingenuity.

You'd need access to the ventilation systems to do that. And battleships are designed to make it very difficult to do that unless you've already captured the ship.

Because the odds of you getting close enough to board without your crew getting blasted to shit are very low, and it is now much, much harder to board successfully.

Have fun storming a corridor with an m249 set up to cover it at fucking ankle height while the men behind him hurl grenades into your file.

>Ancient warships were buoyant enough that they could still be boarded and captured even after taking serious damage from ramming and the like.
Are you kidding? They were utterly incapable of that. The ship has absolutely no compartmentalization, any hole that can't be patched quickly means the ship is dead. Any hole that cuases a list that cannot be patched quickly means the ship is dead. If you list and need to turn, or there are waes, you're dead, because the whole ship is often ~10 meters tall and the side is a bunch of fucking oar slots.\, with the bottom level so low you can reach out and wet your hand.

so when was the last time a ship was boarded and captured in a war?

Machine guns, even if you get past the battery fire they'll just mow you down with the ship mounted MGs

Engagement ranges were much shorter in pre-modern naval combat, which made it easier to get closer and board them because you'd only be under sustained ranged attack for a short amount of time. Fighting up close is advantageous because then nobody will try to sink the ships, typically since it makes the fighting that much more desperate and bloody since now there's only one vessel left to carry anyone to land, so they will fight tooth and nail over it rather than disengaging and retreating if losses are too heavy.

Compare that to today, where warships have guns that shoot farther than the eye can see and have missiles and other shit on them, good luck getting close enough that boarding is even a remote possibility. And even if you did, have you ever been on a modern warship? It's a floating fortress. It'd take hours to cut through all those bulkhead doors and there'd be ambushes waiting for you in every corridor.

Depends what you count. The Germans captured a lot of French ships in ports that got over-run before they could leave during WW2. Nothing big though, destroyers at most.

not really sure but
es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_Huáscar

I was on the USS Olympia once.

>Any hole that cuases a list that cannot be patched quickly means the ship is dead.
How do you get a list if there's no compartmentalization? Flooding will be even.

>How do you get a list if there's no compartmentalization?

Because once a hole gets punched in the side of ship, it rapidly fills up with water.

>They would compartmentalize their ships and would have flooded regions to stabalize their ships and make it immune to sinking (unless you literally blow it up)
Initially, they were really for shoring up the support structure of the junk. Kinda like ribs except its a solid wall that goes up deck.

The compartmentalization was a nice accident, which they then did in earnest by sealing the compartment walls.

>implying the chinese did anything significant

admiral yi is crying from his grave

t. korean

Is there 16 inches of steel in front of that window? It's not meant to repel boarders, it's to stop a hit from destroying the command deck.

Yeah, but you can see his point. Once that door is closed, it will take a very long time to break through it.

Explain how the window will allow access to boarders, even if the glass is removed.

You can use the window as an entry point for introducing sleeping gas into the ship.

or the dudes in the ship will see you trying to smoke them out, and then evacuate the room the gas is in and seal it.

I don't think you know how gasses work.

Forget the gas. Just toss a grenade through the window.

ok. Assuming said explosion doesn't ignite and explode the entire ship, how do you enter the room to capture the rest of the ship?

Well know the gas clears out and you push to the next room

What's stopping them from throwing one at you while you're clusterfucked outside the door?

but how would you even get into the room? It's not like the boarders can breach said hatch or reach through the small window hole to unlock the hatch.

>several million dollars

Yeah take whatever figure you're thinking of and add two or three 0s to it.