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Comment by mehwoot | Hacker News Reader

> Once the huge, lumbering aircraft carriers are sitting on the sea floor, they will be replaced by heavily armored battleships. In a major war, the only sea launched aircraft will be VTOLs.

Huh... there isn't a single battleship in service in any navy in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship#Modern_times

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When the carriers are sunk, it is our submarine fleet with its cruise missiles that will carry the day.

Though modern cruisers and destroyers aren't that much smaller than the dreadnoughts that fought at Jutland, 14,000 tons vs 18,000 tons.

Most modern cruisers or destroyers aren't over 10,000 tons fully loaded, and are thus comparable to the light cruisers of WWII. The Dreadnoughts were a fair bit bigger (2x at ~20,000 loaded), but indeed were not nearly as heavily armored as the WWII battleships of 30 years later. A loaded Iowa-class battleship displaced nearly 60,000 tons.

There will be in a major war. Nothing else can stand up to nukes and lasers.

The only way a battleship would help against nukes is if it somehow fell on whoever is in charge of the nukes.

Battleships can survive close hits by airburst nukes. To defend against this, the opponent must either use massive overkill, or use underwater bursts near their own coasts. Either approach has dreadful economic costs.

War is the art of making the opponent's costs exceed their resources. One way to create costs is to make weapons that are unreasonably durable—the battleship is the extreme end of the spectrum.

There was an airburst test that battleships survived, but the nuke was way off target, even well shielded animals onboard died so if it was crewed it would have been a floating coffin and the nuke was a 20 kiloton device. One single Trident missile holds up to twelve 500 kiloton bombs.

1940s battleships were designed for just enough shielding from chemical bombs and bullets. We can assume that future battleships will have comprehensive radiation shielding. Of course, building a fleet to soften up the Chinese coast is more an exercise in science fiction than military planning.

> 1940s battleships were designed for just enough shielding from chemical bombs and bullets. We can assume that future battleships will have comprehensive radiation shielding.

We would do better to assume that future battleships won't get built, and that future surface combatants for the foreseeable future will be all carriers and destroyers.

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