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Originally Posted by Julhelm
Battleships were hopelessly outmoded the moment Billy Mitchell sank one.
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Quite true, though it took Pearl Harbor and the sinking of HMS
Prince Of Wales before the lesson set in.
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The Iowa's armor protection is comparatively weak and pretty much any modern SSM would mission-kill it outright.
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Here I only partly agree. "Mission-kill" is a tricky concept. If the mission is to deliver heavy artillery to a target, then no, the average SSM will not stop that. "Comparatively weak" is the problem. The armor on any battleship is designed to withstand its own shells at prescribed ranges, since the designers don't consider themselves to have adequate access to the other guy's firepower. This requires that the battle be kept to a range that balances the ship's own strengths and weaknesses. No anti-ship missile is what we would consider "armor-piercing". Yes, such a hit on a battleship has a fair chance of knocking out certain electronics, but it's not going to be catastrophic to such a ship.
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Originally Posted by vienna
USS Stark
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Unarmored. No defense against that sort of thing at all.
Again, completely unarmored. One-half inch of steel isn't going to stop a destroyer's 5" HC round, and it's not going to stop a boat full of explosives. That same attack would have had on effect on a battleship whatsoever.
Bismarck was disabled by dozens of armor-piercing rounds travelling at more than twice the speed of an anti-ship missile, with hardened heads specifically designed to get through that armor. Plus several torpedoes. Plus the scuttling.
Yamato and
Musashi were attacked by dozens of bombs designed to get though light armor, coming straight down onto decks which were only lightly armored. The big killer there was the multiple torpedoes. Building anti-torpedo armor is difficult. It may be proof against one tin fish, but once it has done that job it is useless against a second hitting in the same place.
In all those cases the ships took a whole lot of killing. All that said, though, the torpedo is the bane of the battleships, and there are lots of submarines and lots of planes with lots of torpedoes out there.
In the end it would still be impractical to bring back the battleships, and a huge waste of money for a ship with such limited parameters.