How many 18th century ships of the line would it take to defeat 1 modern cruiser if the ships of the line were allowed...

How many 18th century ships of the line would it take to defeat 1 modern cruiser if the ships of the line were allowed to deploy within cannon range?

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Literally the only way they could win is to have so many ships that they overwhelm the crew of the cruiser with enough numbers that they can't be prevented from boarding the ship and taking it over that way. The Monitor and the Merrimack in the Civil War bounced 1860s cannon shot off each other until they ran out of ammo and disengaged.

It doesn't matter how many there are. The shells wouldn't go fast enough or have enough kinetic energy to pierce the armor. Meanwhile the cruiser wouldn't even have to put men on deck to man weapons. Even if it ran out of ammo it would just ram the wooden ships and suffer almost no damage.

> cruisers
> modern

not a one of them would bother a cruiser even at cannon range

Thanks, guys. Do you think filling the ships with powder and just ramming into the cruiser and lighting it up would work?

USA still has 22 cruisers in service
Granted they are missile cruisers and were commissioned back in the late 70's

But given they're still in active duty and even had upgrades as recently as 2013 it counts

the Ticonderoga-class cruiser has a top speed of 32.5 knots and can sail at this velocity regardless of the wind direction

the fastest sailing ship in the Royal Navy was the HSM Endymion with a top speed of 14.4 knots under optimal condition

there's absolutely no way they could get close

Russia has cruisers in service too

true but as the US navy has the larger number of cruisers as well as the more modern cruisers I'd say using the Ticonderoga as the defining example of modern cruisers is more than justified.

That said, to get a real representation of the capacities of a modern day warship you really should not be looking at cruisers, they're a small minority for a damn good reason.

Then again putting any number of 18th century ships against a modern day submarine or god forbid aircraft carrier would just be mean

the Iowa versus the entire spanish armada

I do wonder, just how armored are modern day destroyers?
It seems like the focus is more on active defenses and intercepting enemy missiles before impact rather than actually surviving the impact.
Anyone got some numbers on the hull thickness and material of modern ships?
After all the Monitor and Merrimack were specifically designed to be impenetrable by canon fire, while modern warships aren't even remotely concerned with the possibility of a canonball hitting them.

Iowa wins this one. Even if we don't give it the nuclear armament, it still has more than sufficient conventional shells to sink the spanish armada at it's height several times over.
It's guns have vastly superior range, it has vastly superior speed to any age of sail ship and it's detection capabilities are much better. It would sink the entire fleet without even once getting within range of a spanish ship.

Honestly, that's sort of maddening, a single ship that's considered completely and utterly obsolete by modern standards sinking what was once the greatest fleet in the world with no effort what so ever.

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>while modern warships aren't even remotely concerned with the possibility of a canonball hitting them.
Because there's no way it ever gets within firing range.

sure but the question was how many ships it would take so it's logical to assume the first phase of the fight would be throwing wave after wave of ships at it until it runs out of missiles, then continue from there onwards

Modern cruisers are not just armed with missiles. For american cruisers there's the fast firing 5 inch gun, the CWIS systems, and there's many weapons that can be mounted on the deck for additional fire power that will be very effective against wooden hulled ships

all of them

How effective would a .50 cal be? Could you just shoot at the waterline and sink the ships that? Hell can the main guns even depress low enough to hit a ship at the close range? Especially since wooden ships are much smaller

If a mauser 7.62 can go through two feet of concrete, .50 cals would shred through a wooden hull. One also has to ask how a wooden ship of the line or smaller would be able to sneak up that close to a modern ship when the mast, sails and rigging would show up on radar like a low flying sperm whale.

>I do wonder, just how armored are modern day destroyers?

Modern destroyers have no armor. WW2 destroyers had no armor. WW1 destroyers had no armor. The term "destroyer" has always indicated a ship with no armor.

Over 9000k would be required. The advanced warfare simulator at the Naval War College, the Pentagon threat simulation team, and Watson all agree.

So basically they'd have to keep charging in till the thing ran out of ammo.

Yeah so basically what happens is [Redacted] fires at the [Redacted] until [Redacted] responds by [Redacted] eventually leading to the inevitable [Redacted].