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Heck, if that one fighter can win a world war alone, it's worth it! E.g. One WW2 battleship could defeat every ship on Earth combined as of ~1830. (and it prob

• WalterBright 10y ago
  The trouble comes when the machine is too expensive to risk in combat, and cannot be replaced if it is lost. We saw this with battleships in WW2.
  • Redoubts 10y ago
    And almost all of Germany v England in WWI
  • nradov 10y ago
    The US Navy constantly risked their battleships (the ones that survived Pearl Harbor) in combat during WW2. They were right in the thick of every part of the Pacific campaign.
    • WalterBright 10y ago
      The Bismarck and the Yamato in particular come to mind.
      • protomyth 10y ago
        If you are looking for a WWII battleship that was too expensive to risk the Tirpitz is probably the best example. I think they let it out once.
        • Animats 10y ago
          Tirpitz did get used a few times, but it was mostly useful as a way to tie up a big chunk of the Royal Navy. Eventually, Tirpitz was sunk by aircraft. The US's four Iowa-class battleships were quite useful, mostly for shore bombardment. They required a huge crew, 2,700 for WWII, Korea), and, after some modernization, 1,800 in the 1980s and 1990s. It's the crew size that led to their retirement. Each turret needed 90-110 people. There was naval interest in building some "bombardment ships" intended for shore bombardment of countries that didn't have a significant capability for shooting back. But that went nowhere, since most of the US's enemies in recent decades have been too far inland.
          • WalterBright 10y ago
            The battleships proved incredibly vulnerable to aircraft. The Bismarck was disabled by a biplane, of all things.
          • NickNameNick 10y ago
            The Tirpitz and also the major portion of the Italian fleet were able to exert disproportionate influence so long as they remained a potential threat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being#World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being#World_War_II
      • gozur88 10y ago
        The Bismarck was sunk moving to its theater of operations. The Germans were very much planning to use it as a commerce raider, and it would have been a big problem for the allies in that role. The Japanese government was afraid to send the Yamato into battle, but that had nothing to do with money (after all, its sister ship was deployed at the 2nd battle of Leyte Gulf). The problem was they'd used it as a centerpiece in their war propaganda, and they thought losing it would be a PR disaster that outweighed any possible utility in battle.
        • WalterBright 10y ago
          A few airplanes sunk the Yamato. It would have been far more effective if the Japanese had sunk (!) that money into better aircraft and better pilot training.
          • gozur88 10y ago
            They had great pilots and great aircraft at the start of the war, but by the time Yamato was sunk it was all gone. They didn't even have enough fuel for a round trip - they were going to ground her and use her as a fixed gun emplacement.
            • WalterBright 10y ago
              > They had great pilots and great aircraft at the start of the war A handful. Nowhere near enough. The Battle of Midway wiped out the bulk of them. The Zero rapidly became obsolete, too.
    • georgeecollins 10y ago
      The US Navy risked its battleships and carriers because they were confident they could be replaced, via production and switching ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The German navy, in both wars, tended not to because they knew they couldn't replace them. The Bismarck was the exception that proved the rule. The Japanese did not really risk their best battleships until things were pretty desperate.
• yxhuvud 10y ago
  WW2 battleships were also utterly useless in actual combat results. Attack submarines and to some extent aerial attacks are what dominated marine warfare during that period. Put everything at the hands of one fighter model and what you get is a single point of failure. What you need in a big war against a worthy adversary is the ability to quickly innovate and iterate on designs, and having a single design that try to do everything is about the worst option available for that. In a war against an adversary that isn't worthy, you can use whatever and you will still win.
  • nradov 10y ago
    That's not true. Battleships were effective in several Pacific surface battles against the Japanese Navy, in shore bombardment during amphibious assaults, and as air-defense escorts for carriers.
    • burnallofit 10y ago
      The point is that subs and carriers were far, far more effective than battleships.
      • foldr 10y ago
        That's not so clear, at least in the Atlantic theatre. How would you sink the Bismarck with just subs and carriers? As it happens, the lucky torpedo strike from Ark Royal played a pivotal role in its sinking, but submarines couldn't go fast enough to catch it, and an unescorted carrier would have been extremely vulnerable. It's hard to say for sure, but in a way it seems that the Hood and the Prince of Wales actually stood a much better chance of causing serious damage to the Bismarck than the Ark Royal did, even if that's not how events happened to play out. (And in fact damage from the Prince of Wales's guns did help to slow the Bismarck down and force it to attempt to go to port to refuel.)
    • lostlogin 10y ago
      The point wasn't that they couldn't attack ones enemy, it was that they had become vulnerable to attack. The reason they could be used for bombardment was that air superiority had been claimed by carrier based aircraft. I don't recall ever reading of battleships being used for air defence. Have you a source? Smaller ships certainly were but big, slow firing guns that can't point upwards seems like a pointless and wasteful accessory on a huge target.
• astrodust 10y ago
  It'd run out of ammunition before they ran out of ships. Then it'd get swarmed by tens of thousands of angry sailors.
  • solotronics 10y ago
    probably it would steam at cruising speed and ram through the wooden ships for days while conserving it's main guns.. I'm pretty sure a cannon ball wouldn't penetrate the armor of a battleship
    • astrodust 10y ago
      It's got finite amounts of oil. The cannon balls might not be able to crack the citadel, the core armor, but they could sure destroy just about every other element of the ship. I'm not sure it'd work that well with the funnels caved in from repeated bombardment, the engines would just choke. Anything weakly armored is going to get pounded to hell. It would take a lot of ships, but it could be defeated.
• kodfodrasz 10y ago
  No single WW2 battleship could destroy every older ship, as the planer is huge, and that battleship is being a single one. This also stands for a single class of ship, as BBs are expensive, and provide only limited power projection capabilities. As it turned out not superweapons, but decent stuff in insane amounts won the war.
• Stranger43 10y ago
  The problem with those kind of scenario's is that they depend on the enemy being utterly stupid and giving you your dream scenario and then just surrendering in defeat something that history shows don't actually happens in the real world. What would actually happen if you sent a US battleship against a age of sail fleet commanded by competent people would be that the battleship would spend all of it's fuel trying to find something to shoot at while civilian shipping kept getting sunk, and then end up destroyed by saboteurs when returning to port for refueling. And that's the dream scenario in the real world you never see that kind of a technology gap persist for long.