alternatehistory.com

So, I know this is a bad idea; I'm only posting this to exorcise it from my brain.

Time frame: late '40s/early '50s, before guided anti-ship missiles were common. Start with a battleship. We want this thing to be heavily-armored enough to resist near-misses from a nuclear weapon, direct hits from light conventional weapons, and resistant to radiation; not sure we can get that with the materials of the time, but let's not let that stop us. We give it a nuclear power plant, of course. For both offensive and defensive armament, we fit it with nuclear artillery - long-range guns for offensive weapons, and short-range "atomic flak" guns for defensive. So if it sees an air raid incoming, it detonates some atomics in the general direction of the incoming, relying on its armor to protect it from the blast and radiation. And of course, it has nuclear depth charges for protection from submarines. The basic idea is to make the environment around it into an atomic inferno so hellish that only something as armored as it can survive.

Obviously, there's only a very short time period in which this monster is even conceivable as a viable idea, before anti-ship missiles get accurate and heavy enough to sink it from range. In fact, if you started building it in 1950, it would probably be obsolete by the time it clears the slipway. And arming it would require a significant percentage of the entire US nuclear arsenal of the time. But it's such an atompunk idea I can't get it out of my head, so I'm inflicting it on all of you. Specifically, I'd like to discuss:

  • Is this even a theoretically feasible design - could they make armor that good in that time frame?
  • What sort of specifics can we put on the design - armor thickness, shell types, etc.?
  • When, specifically, does it become too vulnerable to air attack to be even discuss-able?
If the mods feel it necessary to move this to ASB, I understand, but I would like to point out that there is nothing about this design that is actually impossible, it's just a very, very bad idea.
Top