Able to make it back to port (if that port is <7 days sailing) if it doesn't get attacked any more, under whatever is left of its own power.
Pounding it to death with 16"s and torpedoes is going to end pretty badly considering its armour and the fact that it carries 8 Gustavs, so I can imagine someone seriously consider nuking it if built.
Which should let them turn the engines on and crawl back, no?
We are assuming normal combat conditions. I'm not sure how good the flak is supposed to be on Der Fuhrer, but B-29s fly pretty high anyway.
Hitler did like big, ridiculous designs after all. If he has all the resources of Europe to count on, something like this would probably end up built.
The others are being dropped on Berlin and other places. Fuhrer will catch a second nuke eventually if the first doesn't knock it out, but I think the US command would likely just assume that it was dead after the first, at least until they discover it in port a month later.
That basically defines the thread. It does kind of fit the direction that Hitler would have gone though. Really this is the Ratte of battleships.
- BNC
Actually the Gustav was a terrible weapon, especially in a naval setting. It could fire about once every two hours (although in a naval setting with more automation/mechanization that can probably be halved to an hour, maybe 75 minutes). The muzzle blast will kill the AAA crews, destroy the radars (and likely the manual rangefinders), and do the same to the radios (there were actually problems with 15" & 16" guns in this regard). That means no radar directed gunnery, limited communications, and the chances of actually managing to hit a moving target at one round per gun an hour would be pure luck. A
Montana or
Iowa would have WAY more trouble with a
Yamato or even the already fairly ridiculous H-44.
Actually the way to kill it is with either a sub or carrier aircraft. The AAA defenses are no great shakes, not really, and no matter how much armor you put on the ship (and there is a very finite amount of weight available, especially of you are putting guns that weight 1,500 TONS (or 10X the weight of a U.S. 16"/50 Mark 7) each there are still areas of vulnerability. The ship armor scheme was also, perhaps surprisingly, vulnerable to the USN 2,700 pound super heavy AP shell (with a zone of invulnerability between 30 & 35K yards). The belt is also vulnerable to the USN torpedo family (Mark 13, 14, 15) since it was proposed to be the same as the
Yamato class (both ships in that class were torn to pieces by air dropped torpedoes). The shaft/screws and rudders would also be vulnerable to torpedoes.