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Belated Battleships (KanColle) [REHOST]

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Bringing the engines online would be challenging, to say the least. Probably cheaper to arrange for a tug to tow the ship a ways out to sea.
 
those boilers havent been started in...a decade is being nice about it. filled with rust, pipes need to be opened, and have to have fuel reayd to go, looking at a week to slowly bring preasure back into an engine that has been cold for the past decade plus. all turrets have been sealed, or fixed so they can not be fired without serious time in dry dock to fix it. You would need the hull repaired, any cracks and splits need to be fixed. 3 million wouldnt even cover a hundreth of the shit needed to get the Iowa steaming under her own power. It cost four times their original asking price to modernize them under Regan's 600 ship navy. If you bankrupt Saudi Arabi, you might be able to get the Iowa restored to like new, but then what about hiring people to keep an eye on the boiler? WHat about guys to man the turrets? who will feed the ammo and gunpowder? Need to bankrupt another country to get these people trained in doing that one day trip. Would be cheaper just to actually build the Montana instead, with new tech, new engines, and so forth, but you wouldnt have the 16 inch rifles to go "Boom". so yeah.
 
Rancher_357 said:

Johnston: Ooooo. Just a few bags of powder, then.....FUN TIME!!
Arizona: I don't think firing off the main battery of a museum ship in a major city would be a good idea....
Johnston: (looking at her shoes) ok ...you're probably right...
Pennsy: Ari! Don't say things like that to destroyers! It hinders their creativity!
Arizona: Pennsy! I am responsible for them while we are out sightseeing. Please support me, it's hard enough to wrangle them and you...
Pennsy: Fine...I'll follow your lead.
Heerman: (whispers to Johnston as soon as Arizona is out of earshot) Let's go see if Mikasa's guns work....Pennsylvania thinks it's ok....
Johnston: (grins) yeah....

Diplomatic hilarity ensues.....


**Picture is actually from USS Texas
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The taffies and Pennsy are probably going to be disappointed, cause I'm pretty certain that the turrets and guns that are in place today are just gun and turret shaped hunks of metal. The six inch guns are bolted in place but are still there, but the three inch battery might just work if you had the right ammo and powder.
 
ijnfleetadmiral said:
Well, crap. If I was a Hollywood big-shot, I'd go over to the Iowa in San Pedro and talk with the Curator.

ME: Hi. You know who I am. One of the items on my bucket list is to see battleship guns fire with my own eyes. Here's $3 million for fuel to steam offshore for a day and a couple broadsides. Whaddya say? :D
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Darth Herobrine said:
Curator: With what shells? We don't have any real shells or a way to get any. And it's no fun with blanks.
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PAGDTenno said:
Bringing the engines online would be challenging, to say the least. Probably cheaper to arrange for a tug to tow the ship a ways out to sea.
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There's also the little issue that the standard donation agreement the US Navy makes with museum organizations usually stipulates that the ship is never to move under its own power again, and should they fire her up and start sailing around under her own power, the Navy can (and likely will) repossess the ship and decide how to dispose of it. Given how close Iowa came to being scrapped the first time around, I don't see them wanting to risk it.

BigBadBen said:
those boilers havent been started in...a decade is being nice about it. filled with rust, pipes need to be opened, and have to have fuel reayd to go, looking at a week to slowly bring preasure back into an engine that has been cold for the past decade plus. all turrets have been sealed, or fixed so they can not be fired without serious time in dry dock to fix it. You would need the hull repaired, any cracks and splits need to be fixed. 3 million wouldnt even cover a hundreth of the shit needed to get the Iowa steaming under her own power. It cost four times their original asking price to modernize them under Regan's 600 ship navy. If you bankrupt Saudi Arabi, you might be able to get the Iowa restored to like new, but then what about hiring people to keep an eye on the boiler? WHat about guys to man the turrets? who will feed the ammo and gunpowder? Need to bankrupt another country to get these people trained in doing that one day trip. Would be cheaper just to actually build the Montana instead, with new tech, new engines, and so forth, but you wouldnt have the 16 inch rifles to go "Boom". so yeah.
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...while you bring up a good point about the boilers, the rest of this is... not such a strong argument. When Iowa was in mothballs, she was equipped with a galvanic anti-corrosion system that I suspect was retained when she was museumed; she also continued to get routine drydockings to clean, inspect, and repair the hull. While I don't think she's been drydocked since becoming a museum ship, I'm pretty sure that her curators will have learned from the examples of Texas and North Carolina and have been setting aside money from day one to fund scheduled drydock repairs (because it's cheaper to do the routine maintenance ones than to have to do the sort of emergency work Big T's had to have). Restoring her to fully operational condition would probably be about a billion dollars, tops, given the condition the Navy required she be kept in until 2009. (Remember, much of the cost of the 1980s reactivation wasn't actually in material work on the ships themselves, but rather in replacing their electronics fits with modern sensors and communications gear--those black boxes are sold by the carat--and then making sure the damn things wouldn't break every time they fired the main battery. Even then, it cost only about $400 million per ship to reactivate them, and that's with a longer period in mothballs for all of them but Jersey. And no, there weren't cost overruns--apparently, there was a hard and fast rule that the reactivations had to cost less per ship than a new Perry-class frigate would, and that the only actual requirements be that A) the ship be able to sail safely, and B) the Tomahawk battery had to be installed and working; literally everything else, including reactivating the main battery, was considered an optional, "if there's money left in the budget" thing.)

As for crewmen, while it has been a while, given the age of the people who were involved at the time, I suspect that one could, fairly easily, manage to round up engineering and turret crews for one of the Iowas just by mining the pool of vets who served on them in their 80s careers; most of them would be in their 40s or 50s now, but if you're just doing a one-time trip as people described, that wouldn't be too much of an issue. Note also that you could mine snipes from veterans of the four Sacramento-class AOEs, each of which was built around half of an Iowa-class engineering plant taken from the never-completed Illinois and Kentucky, and which decomissioned in 2004-05, meaning you could probably find snipes who are in their 30s; additional sources of snipes who'd need minimal retraining--mainly just an opportunity to read the manuals and a couple of days crawling around the machinery spaces to get familiar with the layout--would be veterans from the oil-fired carriers, which were very similar. Also, anyone who's been qualified on nuclear power plants would be another option, as the only real difference between a nuclear plant and an oil-fired steam plant is the source of heat used to boil the water. (Indeed, I know of one man who, when he was getting qualified as a civilian nuclear plant operator, as part of his final exam, was taken to a museum that operates steam locomotives, put in the cab of one that was cold, and, without a manual, was given two hours to get it fired up and start building up a head of steam, to prove he knew how steam plants worked.)

tl;dr While a number of your points would be valid for bringing her back into daily operation (military or not), some aren't, and others wouldn't be as big an issue for a one-time "excursion" special trip where you could get people to take time off from their real jobs to help out.
 
Yamagumo and Michishio have been found.

Predictably, Yamagumo is in pieces, with debris scattered over the sea floor.


One of Yamagumo's 5-inch turrets


One of Yamagumo's boilers.


China believed to have been from Yamagumo's officer's mess scattered in the debris field.


Michishio is in one piece.
 
Excubitor said:
Jeez, what happened to Yamagumo? I know the basics of the battle, but mostly in relation to the battleships.
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During the Battle of Leyte Gulf of 22–25 October 1944 she was part of Admiral Shōji Nishimura's "Southern Force". In the Battle of Surigao Strait, she was hit by torpedoes fired by the destroyer USS McDermut, and exploded, sinking at position
WikiMiniAtlas
10°25′N 125°23′ECoordinates: 10°25′N 125°23′E.[5]

McDermut also hit Michishio and Asagumo in teh same spread that destroyed Yamagumo
 
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Excubitor said:
Jeez, what happened to Yamagumo? I know the basics of the battle, but mostly in relation to the battleships.
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According to witnesses aboard Mogami and Shigure, she was struck by two or three torpedoes portside amidships, all within the space of two minutes. Her two quad torpedo mounts - their 'Long Lance' torpedoes primed and ready for launch - were set off, causing her to blow up and jackknife immediately, her bow and stern raised out of the water. She sank in two minutes in a blazing fire; ultimately only two crewmembers survived out of a complement of 200.
 
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Thanks for the explanations. Long Lances may have been great torpedoes, but damn, this and Choukai prove they could be a safety issue too. Guess it does seem to fit the mindset of the IJN at the time.
 
Just watched an anime called "In this corner of the world" about a Japanese woman from Hiroshima moving to Kure before WWII and all the events that happen thereafter...

The art style is almost in a watercolor fashion, very muted and not as bright or crisp as some series, but entertaining...
 
RBomber said:
To be fair, once Pearl happened, IJN can only bet on High Risk, High Reward. Yamamoto kinda flubbed up on estimating American's industrial capabilities and political climate.
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He definitely misread the political climate, but I have to disagree that he underestimated America's industrial capabilities. To quote the man himself,
Isoroku Yamamoto said:
"Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas know that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America."
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RBomber said:
To be fair, once Pearl happened, IJN can only bet on High Risk, High Reward. Yamamoto kinda flubbed up on estimating American's industrial capabilities and political climate.
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No, he knew very well that he'd lose. He just tried to make things costly enough to get America to accept a negotiated peace, as had been the tradition between great powers up to that point.
 
Furthermore, Japan, Like the rest of the world, still held their Battleships as the the main force in a fleet. Yamamoto has to fight tooth and nail to have his CV-centered plans approved at all
 
konnigvanmessen said:
Furthermore, Japan, Like the rest of the world, still held their Battleships as the the main force in a fleet. Yamamoto has to fight tooth and nail to have his CV-centered plans approved at all
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A lot of nations at the time were enamored with the Mahan Doctrine, aka the 'decisive naval battle' involving the good old 'Wall of Battle'...
 
baofengyu said:
A lot of nations at the time were enamored with the Mahan Doctrine, aka the 'decisive naval battle' involving the good old 'Wall of Battle'...
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Arguably the major thing that led the U.S. to abandon the battleline doctrine OTL was the fact that after December 7 we suddenly didn't have a battleline. The USN adopted carriers wholesale not out of choice but out of necessity.
 
Nicholas said:
Arguably the major thing that led the U.S. to abandon the battleline doctrine OTL was the fact that after December 7 we suddenly didn't have a battleline. The USN adopted carriers wholesale not out of choice but out of necessity.
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actually, it was the Washington Naval Treaty that allowed Aircraft carriers to shine. the WNT only limited battleships/battlecruisers. it allowed the CV's a chance to prove their worth. the destruction of the battleline in Pearl diminished the battleship and actually forced the Air Craft Carrier to be pushed to the front line. coral sea and midway were the defining moments to prove that the future was in Aircraft Carriers.
 
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