Musashi found!

[Jarlaxle]

Originally Posted By: hotwheels
Originally Posted By: Eddie
Now we have the IOWA class launching 16 inch shells and Cruse missles with a 500 mile range.


The last Iowa class battleship to be decommissioned was the Missouri in 1992. The Iowa was decommissioned in 1990 and mothballed until 2006. With the iowa having been turned into a museum ship, and era has truly come to an end.

The Missouri was featured in the 1992 blockbuster Under Siege with Steven Seagul, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Busey and former Baywatch girl Erika "Eyebrows" Eleniak. And of course Cher perfomed If I Could Turn Back Time on the Missouri. It looks like the 16 inch guns had been polished to Navy specs for the event!

hotwheels




The ship scenes in Under Seige were actually done on the USS Alabama, in Mobile. 'Bama is actually a different CLASS (South Dakota) than Missouri.

 

[JHZR2]

Originally Posted By: hattaresguy
The rail gun will bring back a sort of battleship, it actually solved many of the problems the 16in guns created. Most notably powder storage.

The problem with capital ships is they are to costly to lose.



Youre assuming youre not trading other power system and stored energy requirements as an equivalent credible risk.

 

[Mykl]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Originally Posted By: hattaresguy
The rail gun will bring back a sort of battleship, it actually solved many of the problems the 16in guns created. Most notably powder storage.

The problem with capital ships is they are to costly to lose.



Youre assuming youre not trading other power system and stored energy requirements as an equivalent credible risk.


I'm under the impression that batteries are more stable and less prone to exploding than gunpowder.

 

[gman2304]

Kudos to the crew of the USS Archerfish for sinking the Musashi.

 

[gman2304]

I misspoke in the post above, got the names Shinano/Musashi confused.

 

[hotwheels]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
Originally Posted By: hotwheels
Originally Posted By: Eddie
Now we have the IOWA class launching 16 inch shells and Cruse missles with a 500 mile range.


The last Iowa class battleship to be decommissioned was the Missouri in 1992. The Iowa was decommissioned in 1990 and mothballed until 2006. With the iowa having been turned into a museum ship, and era has truly come to an end.

The Missouri was featured in the 1992 blockbuster Under Siege with Steven Seagul, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Busey and former Baywatch girl Erika "Eyebrows" Eleniak. And of course Cher perfomed If I Could Turn Back Time on the Missouri. It looks like the 16 inch guns had been polished to Navy specs for the event!

hotwheels




How can you ignore the 2012 blockbuster "Battleship" in your list?!?


I can do that very easily and with extreme prejudice.

hotwheels

 

[hotwheels]

Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: hotwheels
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: A_Harman
I just watched "Sink the Bismark" on YT over the weekend, and could see why the era of the big battleship had to come to an end. The Bismark sunk the Hood with 3 salvoes, but was disabled by a torpedo to her rudder launched from an antiquated Fairey Swordfish biplane. If a fragile wood, wire, and fabric "stringbag" worth about $8000 can render a capital ship useless, it no longer makes sense to waste money on the big battle wagons.


This is true. Though the Brits couldn't sink her. The Germans had to scuttle it to get her to go down. Blew the magazine.

What amazes me was the ineptitude of the Bismarck deployment. Originally the two Bismarck-class sister ships were to sail together but Tirpitz wasn't ready to sail and Hitler was impatient and so the plan was basically scrapped and Bismarck sailed with a small group of U-boats and Prinz Eugen. As with many of these scenarios one wonders how differently they would have played out without the epic blunders.


I highly recommend Léonce Peillard's Sink the Tirpitz! an excellently researched and thrilling novel (docudrama) based on eyewitness accounts and involved in the events leading up to and including the sinking of the Tirpitz. The tale of how Churchill made sure the Tirpitz, which he called "The Beast," his bête noire, would be destroyed at all and any cost. It's a riveting story about spies, torpedo riders, mini-submarines, and the development of special bombs that could puncture the Tirpitz's armor. The story is told from both sides, and it is clear that the command staff of the Tirpitz was at odds with the plans the Kriegsmarine had for the battleship. The book is from 1965, and Peillard researched and interviewed involved people with their memories relatively intact. Really a must-read for naval history buffs.

hotwheels


That sounds very good! I'll be sure to try and source it, thanks!

Let me know what you think of it after reading it!

hotwheels

 

[Astro14]

Originally Posted By: hotwheels

I can do that very easily and with extreme prejudice.

hotwheels


Aw c'mon!

Battleship Missouri saves planet Earth from alien threat after conventional ships all fail? When all is lost, our only hope is the "Castle of Steel", the museum piece, manned by the old sailors who served on her!

You have to skip the horribly done rest of the movie, but when the "Mighty Mo" squares off against the alien ship and fires a broadside, there were cheers in the theater.

Can it get any better for the battleship fan? I submit that it cannot!

 

[hotwheels]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
Originally Posted By: hotwheels

I can do that very easily and with extreme prejudice.

hotwheels


Aw c'mon!

Battleship Missouri saves planet Earth from alien threat after conventional ships all fail? When all is lost, our only hope is the "Castle of Steel", the museum piece, manned by the old sailors who served on her!

You have to skip the horribly done rest of the movie, but when the "Mighty Mo" squares off against the alien ship and fires a broadside, there were cheers in the theater.

Can it get any better for the battleship fan? I submit that it cannot!


In order to enjoy that movie, I'd have to become mentally completely untucked.

hotwheels

 

[Astro14]

I'm not suggesting that you should enjoy the rest of the movie, I didn't enjoy it either. but that scene was great!

 

[hotwheels]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
I'm not suggesting that you should enjoy the rest of the movie, I didn't enjoy it either. but that scene was great!


By that time that scene happened, I was completely worn out from having been served horse manure for almost two hours.

I'll need to dig through my archives and find a picture of an original 16" round and black powder bags from the Iowa. I visited the Iowa when she was berthed in Richmond a few years ago.

hotwheels

 

[hotwheels]

Here is a graphic from the Iowa exhibition in Richmond. The Iowa was converted into a floating exhibition here before going on her final voyage to LA in 2012.

They loaded the 16" gun with a variable number of powder bags behind the projectile.

hotwheels



Here is the projectile with powderbags (not my image):

 

[Astro14]

Do batteries have the ability to deliver the current pulse that quickly?

I thought it would be capacitors in banks to deliver the electric charge to the rails...

 

[hattaresguy]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Originally Posted By: hattaresguy
The rail gun will bring back a sort of battleship, it actually solved many of the problems the 16in guns created. Most notably powder storage.

The problem with capital ships is they are to costly to lose.



Youre assuming youre not trading other power system and stored energy requirements as an equivalent credible risk.


I believe rail guns use capacitors.

 

[JHZR2]

How do you charge the capacitors??? If you say battery, which is an acceptable answer, what about when it depletes?

 

[bubbatime]

In the battle of Leyte Gulf, the American ships had advanced radar fire control that made their guns WAY more accurate than the visually aimed Japanese guns. At 3AM in the morning, American ships located the Japanese ships on radar and began pounding them with their big guns. The Japanese had no idea where the American fleet was and began desperately firing their guns in a 360 arc in all directions in a last minute bid of desperation. It didn't work as the American fleet entirely decimated the Japanese Navy in this one battle and the Japanese fleet was never a threat again.

After this battle, Japan was cut of from it's oil supplies in the Philippines, and thus had to practically park the remainder of their ships in harbor for the rest of the war.

 

[bubbatime]

Interesting fact: Japan was weeks away from an atomic bomb when we dropped the bombs. They could have done a number on our Navy if they had finished their atom bomb a few weeks earlier.

 

[Astro14]

Originally Posted By: bubbatime
Interesting fact: Japan was weeks away from an atomic bomb when we dropped the bombs. They could have done a number on our Navy if they had finished their atom bomb a few weeks earlier.


What???

Weeks away?

All physicists knew about the chain reaction, but that's not the same as developing a bomb. Not even close.

The ability to enrich uranium was a huge hurdle to overcome, even the Germans hadn't figured that one out yet (we didn't have time to test and determine which method worked best, so the Manhattan Project built both the Uranium Hexaflouride diffusion plant and the centrifugal plant in Oak Ridge and then started the breeder reactors in Hannaford to create Plutonium, all in parallel, in case one method proved to be impractical...).

The ability to cause a uniform implosion (as in Fat Man) was also a major technical challenge. Little Boy's design was simpler, but keeping the mass sub-critical and then triggering it was a complex and difficult engineering problem.

Knowing that a bomb can be built, and building it, are two entirely different things. The technical challenges were huge, even to this day, they are huge...that's part of the reason that keeping enrichment technology from the Iranians is so important, but back on topic. the Japanese, and the Germans, did not have the ability to enrich uranium, nor to create plutonium, the materials required to make a bomb. They hadn't even begun heavy water experiments, which used deuterium as a moderator, in order to build a reactor, by the time the war ended.

Bomb design itself is a massive technical challenge, but today's technology makes that easier...

The Japanese conducted atomic research throughout the war, but saying that they were "weeks away" from an atomic bomb is like saying that they were "weeks away" from a manned moon landing...only they just hadn't built the rocket...

 

[bubbatime]

Originally Posted By: Astro14
Originally Posted By: bubbatime
Interesting fact: Japan was weeks away from an atomic bomb when we dropped the bombs. They could have done a number on our Navy if they had finished their atom bomb a few weeks earlier.


What???

Weeks away?


Several sources online seem to think so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLptMQlY6j0-EMy6iar2DxyRAOSM94_isT&v=gdCe2wBeCiw#t=57

There is another source that I'm having a hard time finding that also said that Oppenheimer himself reviewed the Japanese plans/project and estimated that Japan was only 2 weeks away from building a bomb.

 

[hattaresguy]

They were not that close.