President Trump Announces New Trump Class Battleship | Hacker News Reader

President Trump Announces New Trump Class Battleship

navy.mil

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Brings to mind Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus the Great's pride-and-joy warship Vasa.

And Germany's Wunderwaffe.

check out My Tank Is Fight! if you haven't

so many weird weapons developed over the years

I thought the BB class was no longer relevant in today's modern, missile and drone oriented naval battle fields?

Yes but you have to account for the barely-functioning melted brain factor. Reality just can't compete when an old man goes "pew pew! zoom!"

Relevance is obviously not the Fuhrer's concern.

https://backintimetoday.com/hitlers-war-follies-the-10-blund...

It reminded me about how Hitler supposedly pushed for larger, heavier tank designs. Even he didn't name them after himself, though.

Yes-ish. In a serious fight against a peer-ish level adversary, the RoI on such a ship looks very dubious.

But short of that, a huge warship can have great prestige & intimidation value - assuming that it is competently designed, and built, and outfitted, and operated. Naval history is swarming with only-on-paper designs for big warships. And a fair number of real-steel warships which were cripples, glass cannons, or sitting ducks because of incompetence somewhere in that chain.

(Also, the USN is referring to it as a BBG, not BB - https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pre... )

I stand corrected, my memory recalled the old star fleet battles BB class(!)

If you mean in terms of armament, this ship would have more missiles than any other class in the US fleet by a wide margin.

If you mean as a threat, the USN has ships sitting in the Red Sea as the Houthis and Iranians and whoever else sends off drones and missiles and they've all been fine.

I mean, this isn’t going to actually happen. It’s just ego-stroking for mad king Donald.

But yep. Really they died before that; the last battleship ever built was competed in 1946, and scrapped in 1960. It was aircraft carriers that killed them off, really, not missiles and drones.

Rename it the Coup d'État class.

At first glance this seems crazy. But what a battleship with a gun so powerful, that it can shoot down everything. Having a nuclear powered vessel that can shoot a railgun and laser might be battleship in size

A new surface vehicle for naval warfare is absolutely bonkers in the modern era. Even in the littoral space where notionally you don't have the depth for a sub-surface launcher, the LCS project was a complete bust. For anything in deep water, a submarine platform is so much more useful for projecting force and not a sitting duck.

Having a missile boat which can cross the pacific without an oiler is a must if we want to bring anything to the pacific.

The Russia Ukraine war has shown big metal objects are liabilities in the cheap plentiful drone war of the future.

How come this doesn’t work on Israel?

They probably are, but the Ukraine war has not shown that. The only large ship lost by either side was a Russian ship, the Moskva, which was sunk by a Neptune anti-ship missile. Other smaller craft were sunk by naval drones, not necessarily cheap.

The sinking of the Moskva is better understood as a WWII-era lesson - if a warship has lots of munitions up top, unprotected by armor, then all an enemy needs to do is set the first few of those off. Even with an elite crew and ship full of damage control equipment, the ship may end up not worth repairing.

Example: Two 550 lbs. bombs came very close to sinking the USS Franklin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Franklin_(CV-13)#19_March_... The Franklin was about 3 times the size of the Moskva.

Cheap in comparison to the vessels they attacked.

In Ukraine the Russians had to move the fleet out of Sevastopol because of Ukrainian naval drone attacks, mostly to Novorossiysk and then recently have had to block that in with barges dropped across the entrance to try to prevent underwater drones getting in like the one that damaged a sub there last week.

The recent drone attack on the oil tanker Qendil in the Med was an interesting new one. 2000 km from Ukraine and they seem to have used drones to drop grenades or similar on the ship.

> In a recent attack, the destroyer USS Spruance was “in a fight where they shot down three anti-ship ballistic missiles, three anti-ship cruise missiles and seven one-way (aerial drones) that were coming towards” them, said McLane, who didn’t specify when Spruance was attacked.

> On Nov. 11, Spruance and the destroyer USS Stockdale came under Houthi fire, fending off at least eight drones and eight missiles while transiting the Bab el Mandeb, a strait that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.

https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2025-01-16/houthis-nav...

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