Battleship WI

Cook

Banned
So it shouldn't have any sort of defense or way to fight back? And you just that BB's aren't as maneuverable.

Correct, they are not manoeuvrable, they can't turn fast, but they can do 30 knots in a straight line; the submarine will be doing 5 knots. You get the battleship out of range of torpedoes as quickly as possible and task a destroyer, which is both fast and manoeuvrable, to hunt down the sub.
 

Bearcat

Banned
A torpedo is not going to defend a BB against a sub. The sub will still have the advantage of stealth and if an exchange occurs, the sub will fire first, and probably more effectively.

The best ww2 sub defense is probably speed, as in sustained cruising speed. The Iowas are fast enough that they are very difficult targets for ww2 subs, which made maybe 21 knots on the surface, and less than ten submerged.

In the missile age, there might be some justification for having missiles on a BB with their long range - Harpoon, Tomahawk and such. If you want the expense of a modern search AND fire control radar, then SAMs as well. Adding ASW torpedoes, or better yet ASROC, to that is possible, but again adds expense. Note that modern networking as in the USN's Cooperative Engagement Capability means you can use other ships' (offboard) sensors. That helps, but the cost of a large modern BB is prohibitive even so.
 
I'm proposing that they have them as an AS defense.

WWII torpedoes are totally useless as antisubmarine weapons anyways, since all but the most advanced late-war versions don't have any type of guidance mechanism. It might make some sense to put torpedoes on a modern-day battleship, in the form of some sort of ASROC mechanism, but there aren't any modern-day battleships, since the idea of such a large surface combatant isn't practical in a modern-day threat environment.
 
For protection against submarine attacks, decoys or noise-masking system on BB is possible, but don't forget most WWII torps are NOT guided so the usefulness of such protections will be low until mid 1960s.
 

CalBear

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I'm proposing that they have them as an AS defense.

Are we talking about WW II?

If so the ONLY effective weapons against submarines from a surface ship were depth charges (which mean you have to actually pass directly over the sub) or later in the war the "Hedgehog" ASW Mortar, which had an effective range of around 100 yards and required that you get into a tail chase with the sub, line up on his sorry ass, and take a blind shot at him. The advantage of Headgehog was that you didn't automatically lose the sub from your ACTIVE sonar (passive was damned near useless unless the boat's skipper was a fool). There were NO practical ASW homing torpedoes until late in the war and NONE for U.S. surface ships until the Mark 35 reached the fleet in 1949 (the Mark 32 wasn't a practical weapon, not to mention the fact that only around 10 of them were produced before the end of the war). There was a a series of "mines" that the USN used from aircraft and from subs that were either wake followers or passive homing, but they were not of any use from surface assets.
 
It's far better to have dedicated ASW platforms than to put ASW gear on a battleship (where it would take the space and weight of equipment more useful for the battleship's main roles).

Incidentally, a number of battleships did have submerged torpedo tubes. I'm not entirely sure why; they weren't used much, if at all. Perhaps a legacy of the pre-dreadnought era?
 
Look, I never said anything about chasing subs, the point of those weapons would to stave off enemy subs. I'd argue that in the US at least the AA guns did an excellent of killing enemy aircraft.
Okay... depth charges aboard a BB is going to do bugger all at 'staving off' subs. Simply put early WW2 depth charge projectors had a range of less than 50m while the late war Squid had a range of only 250m and even the post-war Limbo system had a maximum range of less than a kilometer. Unless the sub's captain is planning a boarding action he can safely engage with torpedos well beyond the range of any Depth Charge projector system...

As for ASW torps... well, both the Allies and the Germans only got accoustically guided torps into service late in the war. The German torp (G7e) was intended for engaging escorts and so was not designed to be senstive enough to detect a submarine running on batteries. The US torp (air deployed 19 inch Mark 24 'Fido' and sub-launched Mark 27 'Cutie') was designed with subs in mind but that implied a low speed (as high speed meant without more modern electronic filtering noise generate by flow of water past the torp would mask pretty much any other sounds) and even then range was limited (~4000m). Low speed plus relatively limited range plus noise coming from the BB itself equals ineffective ASW weapon.
 

CalBear

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Submerged tubes? Not deck mounted?
:eek:


Submerged tubes were the hot ticket for capital ships. Somebody was at least smart enough to know that fully fueled and armed torpedo + 12" shell =/= a good thing.

The RN had submerged tubes on every class through the proposed N3s. The last USN class with torpedo tubes (submerged) was the Colorado (although the cancelled 1920 version South Dakota class was planned with 2 tubes). The KM L 20 class, which was never built since the war ended, was supposed to have 3 700mm (27.6"):eek: submerged tubes. All KM class during the war had torpedo armament. Same thing for the IJN Kongo & Nagato classes.

The idea seemed to be that the torpedoes would be used instead of the rams that had been part of most pre-dread designs. As strange as it sounds, there was a belief that BB engagements would end up at knife fighting ranges (something that had actually been the case at Tsushima).
 
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