"I'm a battleship junkie" Topic

I love battlewagons both the real ones and the space-going variety.

I bemoan the demise of the old ships of the line with their big guns duking it out like Victorian bare-knuckle fighters with none of the fancy bombers and torpedo planes submarines and carriers fighting beyond the horizon, it doesn't feel "right" in my highly subjective opinion. It's an emotional thing for me, reason and logic are politely invited to stay out of this discussion.

Even the starship variety are probably just flights of fancy, easily taken out by a single starfighter armed with a few good nukes/photon torpedoes despite all that armour, deflectors, shields etc.

But battleships are cool big gun ships, the stuff boyhood fantasies are made of. The appeal of the battlelines closing on each other, the flash of guns on the horizon followed by the distand thunder …

Who else is a battleship junkie ?

Battleships are probably the most realistic model for space warships. No silly fighters zipping about (sigh).

They make a wonderfully suble statement during tough diplomatic negotiations.

Few things cooler in this good old world than a battleship. Battlecruisers will do in a pinch, but it's not quite the same thing!

I like battelships, but I'm also fond of their smaller cousins … everything down to e- and pt-boats. There's nothing quite like a monstrous battleship as a flagship – both as something to defend and something to dish out punishment in large doses.

I don't care for carriers and fighters in space games, but don't mind them in historical games – they are, after all, historical facts. In a space game, however, I can bend the universe to my own tastes.

Doug

Never leave home without the Big Guns.

Yep, hard to beat a battleship (or a line of them, with supporting smaller craft).
BWW

I do like battleships, whether it's wet navy or sci-fi variety. Great imagery, a sense of majestic power that is just so cool. One can't look at a battleship and not be impressed, I think. Just seeing the modernized Iowa's, when they were sailing around, was great.

However, having said that, I must confess my most favorite historical/modern era naval vessel/class are the coastal forces. Small, fragile, deadly little ships darting about the seas, usually at night, playing a cat and mouse game.

"Yep, hard to beat a battleship"

Unless you have a Swordfish handy :)

It has to have at least 8 big guns in turrets.
And, they have to LOOK like guns!
Those ships topday… What are they thinking? They look as intimidating as an office building. How are you supposed ti intimidate Johnny Foreigner with a floating office building?
Guns should belch fire and roar. THAT is intimidating. Not some cream puff little cruise missile that you can deny where it came from. You KNOW where those 16" shells came from! No tinhorn dictator can announce "That is not a battleship 5 miles off shore."

I have to confess that carriers and fighters in space games bother me. Range, fuel, payload etc. Too many pilots getting lost in the dark as they run out of fuel on a trajectory taking them further fromt he Task Force…

I like Battleships too.

Fighters and attack craft are for defending orbital installations.

"Fighters and attack craft are for defending orbital installations."

And even then, in most space games, they seem to ALL be kamikazes, in that their life expectancy is maybe a couple of sorties. Unless you start with a SF race inherently predisposed to valorous suicide, fighters in most games seem to be hard to rationalize. I find it hard to imagine humans climbing into those cockpits voluntarily to face the attrition rates seen in many games.

Doug

I *LOVE* battleships. My desk at work has magnets from all the various battleships I've visited.

My office at home is completely decorated with art depicting Battleships – my friends call it my "battleship porn"** (Yamato, Nagato & Mutsu, Missouri, Malaya, and the 5th Battle Squadron at Jutland). I'd buy more except there's already a bunch of naval stuff in the basement as well. . . and my wife would probably object to me taking over still more rooms of the house with battleships!

My battleship obsession is what prompted me to write Naval Thunder ( navalthunder.com ) since you have to love battleships in order to spend that much time researching them!

Working on a starship game now in which battleships will be the big players. There will be carriers & fighters – because there's a segment of the sci-fi community that loves them. . . but they will be optional and where they are included, secondary in nature to the battleships.

** After thinking about this a while, I realized how accurate a description this is. Porn basically shows the same thing in a variety of circumstances and settings – just like my battleship art! lol

I've taken a major interested in Battleship design and development, so I guess that qualifies me as a junkie as well.

This might be of interest to people.

springsharp.com

-Will

Battleships? Somebody say Battleships?

I knew them all as friends by the time I was 12. There have always been battleships in my life. Always been fleets in my house.

My favorite line: "Cruzers? Zoes are not Cruzers! Zoes are battleships! Open fire!"

Yeah, they're nice. I haven't been to all of them yet, but I'm working on it. Mikasa will be the tough one, for me.
-Kle.

I have to agree.

Carriers with missile armed fighters may be deadly, but there is something truly cool about heavily armored ships with really big guns slugging it out head to head :)

I would have loved to have seen the Rodney or Nelson completed as originally intended.

That would have been a bit special, in my opinion.

Oh, how I mourn for the almosts, what-ifs and scrapped-on-slips.

Oh, yes. More of 'em, please. G.O.B.S.! of 'em, in fact.

You know, My Japanese have a Musashi and a Fuso. LOVE the Fuso.

My Americans have an Alaska and a Texas. LOVE the Texas.

Manly ships. before these sissy airplanes took over. Throwing shells the size of Minivans to the Horizon at each other!

I still have a soft spot for the Warspite.

It must have something to do with the improbable bridge/command centre…

I love big gun Battleships but I really love Battlecruisers. There is still no ship that can equal the beauty of HMS Hood.-such a perfect symobol of the Royal Navy of the inter-war era.

I just love the idea of a ship with guns of a battleship but the speed (and armour) of a cruiser.

In Sci-fi space combat games I prefer minimal carriers with main emphasis being on the gun line.

Cheers

James

There is nothing like watching your opponent crossing of damages as the battleships ( and bigger ing full thrust) open up . Truly satisfying

For gaming purposes, I am split.

In space, I prefer a fast paced dog fight.

On the water, slugging it out with REALLY BIG GUNS has great appeal, especially if you have a longer range than your adversary. All you have to do is keep out of their range and sing "Neener, neener, neener!"

If you think about it, in a space/fantasy setting battleships make big come backs. I've seen plenty of games where the carrier and fighters are not as much a game changer as history and reality has made them to be. Fighter can do damage in these games but they tend to be wiped out easily, there's no cloud cover in space after all. And the big ships can see squadrons coming for thousands of klicks away.

So my starship battles tend to favor the battleships and their escorts once again.

For me it's Yamato first and foremost wheather it's the wet navy version or the Space Battleship.

And StarBlazers Fleet Battle System is the rules for using the StarBlazers minis with.

I've got over 500 StarBlazers mini's of which i've built/painted over 300 myself.

And the real nice thing about these minis is that all of the ships are in scale with each other,for me that's a BIG plus in my book.

Captain Gideon

Played my 2d ASFOS game last night. A B5 Earth Force fleet vs a battlestar. (Hey, they are the only painted ships I have stats for.) There was something cool about the battlestar dreadnaught closing to point blank range, knocking out 5 Hyperion cruisers in 4 turns, while shrugging off the minimal damage they inflicted.

If I have to have favorites (in no particular order):

The SoDaks – 680 feet of weaponry surrounding an ice cream shop. Nuf said.

Strasbourg & Dunkerque – Art Deco with screws

Fuso and Yamashiro – Yertle the Turtle with guns – or like two elderly elegant Victorian ladies wearing every piece of jewelry and every stole they have ever owned

Jauriguiberry – Unconventional, even among her unconventional half-sisters

Nevada post Pearl – My eyes are bent, my knees are grey and my hair is old and dim, but I'm going to pound the crap out of you until you are a thin film on the floor, for what you did to my sister and her friends.

I like my ships big, tough, shooty, and unsubtle. Sure, make 'em graceful if that doesn't detract from the mission -- I'd rather look at a Hood, an Iowa, or a Yamato than a "large angry oil tanker" like the Rodney or Strasbourg. But even they look better to me than a Ticonderoga. There's just no arguing with multiple large gun barrels when they're pointed at you.

I recently asked for 'references/books' on the IOWA-class battleships and got a lot of info from fellow TMP'ers…(for which I'm thankful!)…

But…if 'nobody/nothing ever truly dies'…as in Kirk, Spock/Enterprise…etc…

Why not 'convert' the other 'surviving' battleships into space battleships like Yamato? I've heard some folks say it wouldn't be THAT hard to convert most nuke subs to 'space'…(provided you had coolant water/anti-grav drive etc…and a few mods)…

Why NOT 'save' these TITANS and retrofit them with the tech like shown in STAR BLAZERS (if/when?) it becomes available????

Anybody remember 'Victory at Sea' series…(I have the old music album!) and one of the cool 'episodes' was the music when a battleship was ramming thru a hurricane???? Waves that scared the beejeebers outta me as a kid on TV and the battlewagons just kept 'going'….*sigh

It's like jumping back to an earlier era…where 'duels' were fought with swords or single-shot black powder pistols….

That'd be something to see…in person…a group of Battleships….'slugging it out'…toe to toe, bare-knuckled…(remember in ORIGINAL 'BSG' when Lloyd Bridges as 'Commander Caine' took the PEGASUS between TWO base-stars right at BALTAR's base-star and even with THREE base-stars…when BALTAR found out it was CAINE….he 'strategically advanced to the rear' because CAINE was coming for HIM!

I LOVED that part….and I love the 'Hand of God'/final episode where Galactica went 'head on' with a base star!!!

GIMME more!!!!

Slish!
Sgt DWW-btod

Never leave home without the Big Guns

take them along as ballast. missiles are more accurate and have longer range.

in historical terms of course. in space of course you can make up the tech as you go along.

No missile launch compares to this though…

YouTube link

or this

YouTube link

The problem with all those movies that show nimble fighters winding in and out of combat with big clumsy battlewagons ignores one important and very key item – physics

In space, you don't have any of those nasty gravity-related limitations on ship size and power – how effective is a fighter likely to be when your opponent has lasers that are computer guided and half a kilometer across?

"Why not 'convert' the other 'surviving' battleships into space battleships like Yamato? I've heard some folks say it wouldn't be THAT hard to convert most nuke subs to 'space'…(provided you had coolant water/anti-grav drive etc…and a few mods)…"

Kinda a break from the thread topic about how AMAZINGLY AWESOME battleships are. . .

. . . but if you want to read about a nuclear sub converted into a starship try John Ringo. The first book – Through the Looking Glass is an incredible ground based alien invasion of earth story – but at the end they find 1 stardrive (not related to the story, they just kinda throw it in at the end) that they figure out how to use, but can't really replicate yet. The rest of the series thus far is about this nuke sub's adventures through the galaxy. Awesome stuff.

Back to your regularly scheduled 'Battleships are Awesome' thread. :)

If you're going to do the 'subtle diplomatic manipulation' bit, as mentioned by Cold Steel above, be sure to paint the battlewagons white first. That shows you're really peaceful.

Oh, and I love me some Battleships. Spent the night aboard Texas a few years ago.

I love battleships, no question that the sight of those Iron Titans duking it out is awesome (if deadly for the poor souls manning them). But I think those old Soviet Missile Battle Cruisers launching all of their missiles at the same time would be more scary and epic. I mean 8 16in guns blasting is awesome, but having 100 missiles surge towards you at the same time is scary.

@Virtualscratchbuilder: I think this youtube link trumps yours in terms of "oh, !" factor and explosive power delivery: YouTube link
Ignore the idjits who think it's faked, subs haven't launched anything from the surface since they retired the Regulus missiles back in July of 1964.

All that said, nothing beats a battleship for gunboat diplomacy. Sure, those Ohio SSGNs deliver a lot of SEALs and tomahawks to the party, but that's for when you need to be subtle. When the time to be subtle has passed, where's that battlewagon?

And battleships in space is the preferred space-navy paradigm, IMO. Sure, one-man small craft let you do the knights-in-shining-armor routine, but you don't get *battles* that way, you only get skirmishes with a dozen craft on a side or so. What happened to real battles, where there are a dozen *cruisers*, 4+ battlewagons, and 40+ destroyers?

Hey, here's another steam punk anime featuring airborne battleships, it's been around for a while now. Check out Last Exile, they have small fighters called Vanships but most of the battles involve these flying battleship like crafts.

Legend of Galactic Heroes is already well know for it's truly epic battleship fights.

No missile launch compares to this though…

YouTube link

or this

YouTube link

battleship guns are like flint knives compared to modern weapons systems. just as an example, the battleship's guns have a max range of 40km, whereas a p-700 missile has a range of 600km.

and the p-700 delivers a 750kg warhead, not much smaller than the 16" shell on a battleship, or (hate to rub it in) a 500 kt nuke.

link

Sci-fi battleships on the seas of Venus. Enjoy.

Techno-junkies and missiles! Big guns are the class way to fight battles as light sabers are for dueling. Just bought a nicely painted collection with lots of US and British battlewagons. Loverly!

pssst … light sabres are make believe ….

so is the idea of a "class way to fight battles"

Battleship junkie? I can just see you now, hanging around a street corner: "spare change for a battlewagon, man?"

I sailed with a Dutch "Old Man", whose grandfather, a fisherman, was fishing in the N.Sea whilst Jutland was being fought! Imagine seeing that going on around you!

Why can't you just have a Carrier AND a Battleship?
link
:-P

Battleships are cool… there should be rule for 'em… just like Mecha.

Anime is full of Battleships, and that's the way it should be. I love LotGH and Yamato just for the big so-and-so's belting each other with multi-coloured death. FASA's Leviathan for the same reason, although I'll probably try A sky full of Ships or GOBS! to give the right 'feel' of mammoth fleets of TOG and Commonwealth heavies going toe to toe. More than 2 battlewagons a side was a headache with the original game. Mind you, for all its simplicity, the biggest space games I've been involved in have all been Battlefleet Gothic. (Mostly cruisers, of course)

Captain Gideon – you got HOW MANY Starblazers minis?!?!? I know those are little minis, but – gaaaah! Makes my 40+ collection of Bandai Yamato kits pale into insignifigance!

Big fan of the big ships--especially the awesomely named Super Galactic Dreadnoughts from the Galactic Knights range of minis by Monday Knight (formerly the Starfleet Wars range from Superior Models).

With all the dicussions about whether carrier theory even works in interplanetary space, or even orbital space, expect dreadnoughts back, even if it's more missiles than big guns; remember some Russian missile "cruisers" are the size of WW2 carriers, so I prefer to call them missile battleships anyway.

Space *BATTLESHIP* Yamato is to me the magnum opus of the battleship – *and* the starship! My favorite from the series remains the Andromeda, which looks like the offspring from a Saturn V crossing with an Iowa class battleship!

Battleships? In space or at sea, one can NEVER have enough of them…

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net