NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: Is it just me or do alot of people feel that this whole superbattleship construction thing is being taken to far? In II theres atleast 3 posts I know of that are advertising massive super battleships ranging from 1,500 feet to 3,600 feet.

All of the models are excessively large, larger then air craft carriers but much less versatile and carry less firepower then a carriers air wing and cost nearly 3x-12x as much as a carrier. Another major problem with these superbattleships is there cruising speeds are very low most at 15-20 knots when the average cruising speed for a cap ship is 25-35 knots. This means either the battleship is forced to trail behind the fleet and not be covered in its AA and ASW defense grid or the entire fleet must slow down to keep the battleship in the pack lowering the fleets response time and making it more vurnable as a whole to enemy attack.

Another major problem with these "super" ships is that they primarily have guns over 18 inches. Anything past 18 inches doesnt get an increase in range but actually a decrease. So a traditional battleship with 16-18 inch guns would be able to pummel a super battleship into submission by using its speed and gun range to stay out of the super battleships reach.

The worst flaw with these ships is the fact they stand out so much. If one of these were to appear on the field of battle, I would instantly have most of my defenses directed against it. Even though they are heavily armored a concentrated assault against these large and slow vessels will bring them down in short order.

I have yet to find a reason why a person would want to devote the time and money to purchasing or building these ships, even ignoring the facts that you need extra large docks and have to devote 4-7 thousand men to manning these ships there are no tactical or strategic advantages to having them within the fleet. For a cheaper commitment of resources men and armaments you get much greater firepower that is more versatile and does not depend on one ship.

Average battleship cost: 1-3 billion depending on whether you are using conventional or nuclear power. Now the cheapest superbattleship I have seen is 18 billion so from a cost perspective you could build anyone from 6-18 battleships or over 30 smaller ships. For the most expensive superships i have seen prices as high as 60 billion, meaning anywhere from 20-60 regular battleships and over a fleet of conventional ships.

Size: The amount of resources going into these superships is massive ranging from 1500-3600 feet long of steel upto 30 inches thick. Only calculating hull lenght and not volume for armor thickness or internal materials. 1 3/4 battleships could be built for the smallest models and 4 1/2 for the largest. Remember Im not including in that armor thickness or the internal mass, all that is is just based on hull lenght. It is possible to probably get up to a dozen battleships from the scrap of just 1 3600 foot superbattleships considering the armor thickness of 30 inches.

They kinda remind me of the Floating Fortresses in 1984. They're big, cumbersome, obsolete in a few years, useful for little more than cratering helpless native cities, and are produced almost solely to waste resources and labor so they don't have to be spent on the peasantry.

Psychological warfare. It's massive, it's got a lot of big guns. Aren't you afraid? No? Apparently, psychological warfare doesn't work in NationStates. Calculated terrorism aside, there's always bragging about having the biggest imaginary dick.

Updates:
Cost: I have found a super battleship selling for over 250 billion dollars now to put that in perspective for 250 billion dollars you would be able to pay for the construction up front. You would be able to buy: 62 Carriers or 500 assorted surface ships(with an average price of 500 million a high estimate) or 82-250 battleships. If distrubuted properely this 250 billion would be able to pay for the complete construction of a surface with over 12 carriers, 300 surface ships(not counting battleships), 50 conventional battleships and will have 2 billion dollars left over. Forgoing the battleships you could construct approx. 75 attack subs.

Upkeep: The standard cost amount for upkeep is approx. 5-15% the cost of construction. Smaller ships have a lower % and larger ships have a higher. Just for the sake of standardization we will assume all ships have 10% upkeep. A Ticonderoga cruiser has an annual upkeep of about 30 million. A Burke destroyer has an annual upkeep of 20 million. A perry frigate has an annual upkeep of 16 million. A Nimizt carrier at 10% would be approx. 400 million a year(FAS.org has it listed at 166 a year for the ship alone but also has a listing for 400 million which also includes the air wing and all other systems which is the total im using. )
Now an superbattleship costing 18 billion will have a average upkeep of 1.8 billion. Enough to support 30 Ticonderogas or 4.5 carriers for a year. Even at 5% the battleship would still be outgunned by the amount of lesser ships with 15 ticonderogas per 1 battleship. And about 1.75 carriers can be supported at this number which beats the battleship in range and versatility for weapons.
Taking the abosulte extreme price of 250 billion for a superbattleship a yearly operating cost would come to 25 billion allowing for the upkeep of 833.3 cruisers. Even if the upkeep for this massive warship was only 1 percent that is still 2.5 billion dollars.
Now no matter how powerful this ship can be it can easilly be overwhelmed by numbers on a navy that doesnt spend tens of billions on a single ship.

Lets say it takes 10-20(for this example we will use 20) ticonderogas to meet the combined firepower of 1 these superbattleships. Now we have country A the attacker which invested 250 billion on one super battleship. And Country B the defender who invested all there money on ticonderogas(though it hardly make sense for a navy to be all cruisers its just an example.) So country B has 833 Ticonderogas. Both have 25 billion dollars for upkeep a year. Even if the cruisers were forced into gun range with the behemoth there concetrated fire and numerous numbers would allow them to take down the battleship in short order. Even if only 30-60 ticonderogas were present in this battle they would eassily prevail over the larger ship having numerical superiorty and 1.5 to 3x the firepower. If Country B losses 20 ships it has only lost an investment of 10 billion whereas Country A will lose an invest of 250 billion and it will take him a considerably longer amount of time to rebuild those ships probably on the order of 4-6 years in special dockyard, whereas the entire cruiser force lost could be constructed at a leisurely pace in 2-4 years at any large dockyard in the country.

Psychological warfare. It's massive, it's got a lot of big guns. Aren't you afraid? No? Apparently, psychological warfare doesn't work in NationStates. Calculated terrorism aside, there's always bragging about having the biggest imaginary dick.

Psychological warfare works more at a ground level and not much at a naval level, troops can rout easilly very rarely will a naval task force rout.

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Another point I failed to mention in my 2 previous posts is the only two real life equivelents of Superbattleships would be the Yamato battleship and its sister ship which name I cant remember at the moment. As soon as they arrived in thearte the american forces immediately concentrated most of there firepower on the ships. Sinking the sister ship and scaring the Japanese into never having the Yamato leave port until nearly the end of the war, when it went on a mission to beach itself on Okinawa to be used as artillery for japanse soldiers. Once it departed from the harbor it was immediately sent on by submarines and aircraft and promptly sunk.
So the appearance of superships on the scene leads to overwhelming force being applied to them.

-OOC-

Yes, leave superships to us Future Techers. They're a lot more effective there.

Heh. If you think that stuff's bad, you should see Yui...

whats yui?

Lets say it takes 10-20(for this example we will use 20) ticonderogas to meet the combined firepower of 1 these superbattleships. Now we have country A the attacker which invested 250 billion on one super battleship. And Country B the defender who invested all there money on ticonderogas(though it hardly make sense for a navy to be all cruisers its just an example.)

As if spending your entire naval budget on one ship makes any damn sense either. These things are used with a fleet, not as a fleet. A powerful nation could afford, and effectively use, such a vessel. Most people throwing these things around can do neither.

The above mentioned Yui is more expensive than most space capital ships, and probably more pricey than anything on the water. However, despite having insane amounts of armor, it still doesn't travel alone. Using the example you give, nobody would bother with anything larger than a destroyer or a gun boat. After all, aircraft carriers are real expensive too, and are even more vulnerable, airplanes not withstanding.

It's all a matter of scale. If half your military budget goes to the upkeep of one ship, you're an idiot. If your military budget is in the trillions, they can start to make sense.

It still doesn't make tactical sense to build one because you can get the same effect for a much cheaper sum and not have it all rely on one ship. Sure it would be effective in a fleet but of course the fleet has to slow down considerably because of the fact the battleship won't be able to keep up without straining its engines.

If that problem was solved you still have the main problem of having a huge "come sink me now" sign tacked onto your side. Hell I wouldn't even want to be within a mile of this thing even if it was in my fleet considering most of these are sporting thousands of tons of explosives for its weapons. the Average 30 incher would have a 2 ton warhead. If the ship explodes its going to explode with the force of a small nuclear bomb.

And I have no problem with people buying or developing them I think its really foolish. What I have a problem with is im going to have to fight people who think these are the end all warships and nothing on the sea can defeat them because they are superbattleships, esspically since alot of newbs are buying them.

After some digging, I found the thread that contains the launching of Yui. The links below are to specific posts inside the thread. Most of the thread is character RP, so not very critical to this discussion.

Also, keep in mind that GMC and I spent three months real time building this thing. However, that was from when funding was approved. The ship was first put forward in April of '03. Total time, we're looking at close to 10 months of work. So, accusations of godmodding will be ignored. Remember who built this thing...

If you want a much briefer description of the general armament, this post (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=5995844&postcount=49) contains the ship's avatar describing herself. And there's a touch more on this post (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=6008798&postcount=54). Oh, and I almost forgot, here's (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=5985547&postcount=44) the listing for the aircraft it can carry.

Interesting ship. I can understand wanting to build a supership in space since you don't have to worry about mass that much because of the lack of gravity and the more mass you have the stronger its inert gravitional field will be.

Actually writing that lass line made me thing about some of the ships, how the hell do you make it so, something a half mile long and nearly a quarter mile wide float under its own will. It would be funny if those super battleships all just sunk after being let out of drydock.

*goes and find a naval engineering site*

I think ships like the Doujin uses Trimarean hulls to answer your question, but these only go so far.

Also the reason why these things are being created is because of the lack of strategy in almost all of the RP's. Most rps use tactics from WWI and ealier where commanders would just send waves apon waves of men to their death, and they think that bigger is better. (Super Battleships fo NS=Super Dreadnoughts of WWI) I wouldn't be surprised to read someone trying to arrange his modern day troops into firing lines and skirmish lines.

This does seem to be largely assuming that the players don't know what the problems with giant ships are. You do realise militaries hang on to old theories and outdated thinking and make mistakes, right?

the Yamato battleship and its sister ship which name I cant remember at the moment.

Musashi, IIRC.

Musashi, IIRC.

Third ship in the class was Shinano, re-built as a carrier and torpedoed on the way to final fitting out.

Someone's already said psychological warfare and that's mainly it. The... 31st(?) Commandant of the USMC said something like "The US Navy is out there. Let the natives touch the grey hulls of our ships. Even if he can't touch it, seeing the grey ships come and go in the distance sends a powerful statement."

This is basically the whole point of having a Souped-Up (Super) Battleship. NS is notorious for having "I build this superweapon to outfight and outlast every single weapon currently in existence!". If we used the current arsenals of the US and Russia in NS, we'd all surrender because our weapons would be so called ineffective against everything NS churns out.

In other words, the only reason could be summed up as: "We have the power and prestige. When we trot these things out and play with them, we're sending in everything including the kitchen sink."

Sort of like... And my apologies in advance, "Men with big cars usually have small..." :p

My reply? Let them build the Doujin class, the xxx-class, the Uberbattleship-class vessels...I really don't care. They can add as many guns of as many sizes as they want...but I know that when my ships (mostly small) come into range, they will be the victors.

A lot of NS'ers don't know jack sh!t about naval tactics or technologies...and if there was any sort of RP regulating board I would ask that they require licenses for RP'ers to bring out/build anything aside from pre-existing ships. There is a very small number of players who I trust to build large-scale ships...one of these is GMC. GMC is, in my mind, the foremost and only superscale ship builder who has the faintest clue about how to build, manage, and maintain such vessels without godmodery. I know a lot of this because I've RP'd selling and modifying the largest WA ship hulls in existence to meet the enormous needs of the GMC designs...and because I've read the RPs that address the very lengthy, but realistic, construction periods.

As for the potential claim that trimarans solve all problems...I'm gonna call BS. Trimarans allow for the following: A greaters speed for small and large vessels of a certain size, an increased useful deck area v. the length of the ship, a greatly increased stability while underway and at high speeds (allowing for the use of heavy weapons on smaller ships and high speed operations in poor weather conditions). The improvement becomes less for larger vessels. Even WA's trimaran-based Carriers (the first in the field) did not notice a tremendous improvement in speed, although they were able to be somewhat smaller and greatly more stealthy due to their "modified trimaran" hull structure.

IF these other folks want to build massive ships for more than the cost of one of my Grand Fleets (not cheap lil things themselves) then god bless their souls...because I'll be able to flatten their country from the sea before their big beauty shows up (if it shows up at all, since I'd most certainly sic a number of strategic and atmospheric bombers on the large, slow, and easy target the moment I decided to attack them)...and if they're a smaller and less economically powerful nation then I'll be happy to see that their entire navy was just crippled by a triplet of B52s and a handful of BM747s...since one hardly needs to sink one of these ships when they can just as easily be robbed of all deck-based (and even covered under-deck) weapons with a dozen or so Submunitions Dispensing Bombs...that turn their turrets into holders for three 21" caliber cheese graters. The absolute LARGEST direct-fire ships in the WA navy are just about the size of the Iowa class...and they cost about 3-4bn..but are accompanied by 2-4 other bombardment ships which together bear about as much power as these superbattleships...only they are a fraction of the cost.