"Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea" Topic

"The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings.

They're fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the fastest things on the high seas. They're huge; they're made of foot thick steel armour, they have brobdingnagian cannons on them. Some of the Washington treaty battleships had such powerful guns, they could have capsized if they lit them all off at once.

Dreadnaughts were the tumescent penii of navies from 1900 until 1942 or so, just as aircraft carriers and nuclear ballistic missile submarines are now. Navies were then measured by how many Capital ships they had. The idea was, if you had two and your enemy only had one, you could go blast the enemy's one ship and be the ruler of the seas. Ruler! Of the seas! No small ships could possibly sink your battleship (at least, according to the doctrine of the day), so if you had some battleships, and the enemy didn't; you were in charge of Neptune's realm…."
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Amicalement
Armand

The mindset remains…just look at all the Mecha fanboys.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I had just the same thought with regard to big, stompy robots.

It's interesting though,that he blames Hanson of forgetting about facts, and at the same time says:

"They were giant mechanical knights, animated by a thousand men! Great robotic juggernauts who cruised the seven seas for … well, I don't know what they did it for; some kind of supremacy of the high seas thing, but it was pretty cool that they did."

Mahan very clearly lays out why you would want to do this; seems a shame that this writer forgot to read him to understand why. NOTE: I'm not saying Mahan was right or wrong, just that his thinking inspired how WWI was fought at sea.

I had just the same thought with regard to big, stompy robots.

With SWORDS. And CHAINSAWS. The coolness doesn't stop by adding legs to the land battleship.

Mr. Locklin should ask the Kaiser what happens when your enemy has battleships which prevent you from importing food, fertilizer, and other stuff you need to feed your people while fighting a war…

That guy is an idiot.

Still the Kaiser would not risk the fleet a second time…not even in final desperation. I think the prestige factor and that risk of loss was even worse than starving the war effort. If we had been playing a strategic wargame , the Germans would have been better served with uboats and commerce raiders rather than spending the money on a do nothing fleet. Even working on better artillery, aircraft and tanks earlier rather than battleships would have been better play.

wpilon +1

He's a tool.