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Belated Battleships (KanColle) [REHOST]

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Nixeu said:
I don't know if the war could even last that long. The Abyssals' need to consume humans to fuel themselves seems to put an upper limit on the time this war could possibly last. And I suspect thirty years would be rather unlikely, even if it might be technically possible.
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That just seems to be for the Demon/Princess class ones. No signs point to them needing anything but standard resources to make anything else.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
That just seems to be for the Demon/Princess class ones. No signs point to them needing anything but standard resources to make anything else.
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The Princess are the ones expanding their fleets at this point, though, from what I can tell. I don't think they get additional ships except from the Princesses. So, without them, the Abyssals are pretty boned anyway.
 
Nixeu said:
The Princess are the ones expanding their fleets at this point, though, from what I can tell. I don't think they get additional ships except from the Princesses. So, without them, the Abyssals are pretty boned anyway.
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I meant that they only need humans to make more demons/princesses, not that only princesses need them.
 
I mean, If we wanted to go full-on GrimDark, they could always set up breeding farms of humans for food ...
 
They're smart enough to run human prison camps for food.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
I meant that they only need humans to make more demons/princesses, not that only princesses need them.
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Oh. Well then I just plain disagree.

Sure, they may need it to make more ships, in the same way Wash and Mutsu are probably eating for two right now. But I suspect it's their equivalent to, well, food. In the same way a regular shipgirl turns food into ammo and fuel, I figure they probably turn blood into those things.

After all, they're something of a dark mirror image of the shipgirls, and besides, giving one side a logistics limit and not the other is just unfair. Plus, it encourages the Abyssals to fight just to survive. And the ancient gods of the sea seem to be nothing if not brutally fair, as well as bloodthirsty. See also: the equalizing effect of Spooky Magical Abyssal Bullsh*t.
 
Farmerbob1 said:
You know, it might be possible to salvage Jersey's hulk to refit Iowa. Jersey was sunk in shallow water.
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It's pretty much a given that Jersey's hulk would have been stripped of anything still in good enough shape to be able to be repaired/refurbished and reused on Mo or Wisky, much as how Ari's hulk was thoroughly stripped of everything of value that they could get at during 1942 IOTL.

Granted, losing Mo and realizing that Iowa might need to be reactivated as more than a parts hulk after all might result in her hulk being re-picked over for stuff that would normally be considered not worth salvaging (for example, at least half of her belt armor would still be intact after a forward magazine explosion; while it wouldn't normally be considered worth saving, the Navy might decide it's worth it to go in and retrieve the intact plates for possible use repairing battle damage to Iowa's belt), but with the exception of stuff that's buried deep in the hull, damaged beyond economical (but not possible) repair, and stuff that's normally considered to be pretty much a non-removable, non-replaceable part of the ship, just about everything that would be of value for reviving Iowa would have already been pulled off and put back into the supply system.

This is why I said that starting new production of what parts we can build right now, without having to completely rebuild the infrastructure and experience base to do so, would be a top priority even before losing Wisky and Mo--the stockpile of such parts is critically low, even using Jersey's hulk, Showboat, Mamie, 'Bama, and the Big Stick as parts hulks, and while it would take years to be able to resume production of things like main battery guns and armor, a large percentage of the rest of the parts needed to repair (or indeed build) an Iowa-class ship would be things that industry would not only be able to produce without an extensive study-and-reconstructing-the-plants period, they would be things that industry would probably be able to produce faster and better than we could back during the original production run. (For example, the mechanical components of the fire control computers are, essentially, just special-purpose versions of things we've never stopped producing for automobile valvetrains and drivetrains; even if we weren't to halt car production so we could convert their parts plants over to building these, any decent machine shop with a CNC mill could produce these parts from their original blueprints in far less time than it took originally, and quite likely to even finer tolerances than were possible back then. Replacement turbines or reduction gears? The turbines could be supplied by any company that makes electric power stations, while the reduction gear sets could be sourced from the same place we get them for our aircraft carriers. At least as of the mid-80s, the Navy still had all the machinery and tooling for building 16" shells and powder still in storage; while it might have been disposed of in the last ten years or so, it's entirely plausible they might still have it--and if not, the Army still knows a thing or two about how to make big-caliber shells at one of the Arsenals, so they could speed up the process of tooling up for a new line. And so on.)

That said, unless Iowa manages to MSSB up some overlooked stockpiles of 16"/50 Mark 7 guns, I don't see her being resurrected any time soon, given that Mo's main battery guns (along with Jersey's) were spiked in the mid-to-late 90s by an overzealous junior officer who got ahead of himself on the demilitarization process when it looked like the Navy was going to dispose of the ships. It's pretty much guaranteed that the guns that sank on Mo were taken off of Iowa, since a spiked gun can't really be made safe to fire without a complete relining (a gun factory-level job--whenever we needed to reline battleship guns, we literally just dismounted the worn-out guns and installed fresh ones, sending the old ones back for relining and return to the supply system); barring such a miracle find, or a Texas-style self-summoning refit, the Big Stick would be a fangless tiger until such time as someone was able to construct a factory that could reline the spiked guns. While, in theory, one might be able to take the best guns from Showboat and the SoDaks (which would be an awesome name for a band) to rearm Iowa with them, along with the gears and cams from their fire controls to install in Iowa's computers, I'm not sure if those guns would still be in good enough condition to be safe to fire, since, while they're capped properly, they haven't been cleaned or maintained in over 50 years, and the bore may have deteriorated just from salt air--it's the sort of thing you'd need to have an expert inspect them for, and there's a good chance you wouldn't be able to get a complete set of good guns out of the three ships, not to mention the logistical issues involved in removing their guns and transporting them all the way across the country to California to be installed on Iowa.
 
Considering just how well Mo did in the face of ridiculous odds, I could see a push to begin construction of brand new BBs. However that would take time.
 
rdfox said:
Showboat and the SoDaks (which would be an awesome name for a band)
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Adds that to the list, right behind 'Rei Ayanami and the Dummy Plugs'.
Archduke said:
Considering just how well Mo did in the face of ridiculous odds, I could see a push to begin construction of brand new BBs. However that would take time.
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That's the real sticking point. Even assuming everything else goes well, building something like a Iowa-class BB is a years-long project under the best of circumstances, and there's only so much throwing more money and men at the project can do to rush it. Even under wartime 'full speed ahead, all emergency measures', Iowas took between 32-40 months to build. Even if the USN started right away, it's still nearly 3 years before you'd have one operational. And that's even assuming you could concurrently rebuild the support industries to make specialty things like 16" guns and such while more conventional things like the hull and machinery was done in existing shipyards.
 
I'm going with it taking the better part of a decade to build one, even without changes. But pherhaps something like the Des Moines class?
 
Roaming_Guardian said:
Odds are the best were gonna get in any decent timeframe is railgun equipped heavy cruisers.
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Railguns need a lot of capacitors to charge up for a shot. they would need to be tested for shock, how they handle salt water, what if you have an electrical fire? what is the new power plant going to be? it would take just as long to build a railgun weapons platform as it would to build a new battleship.
 
BigBadBen said:
Railguns need a lot of capacitors to charge up for a shot. they would need to be tested for shock, how they handle salt water, what if you have an electrical fire? what is the new power plant going to be? it would take just as long to build a railgun weapons platform as it would to build a new battleship.
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The Zumwalt-class was built with them already in mind, and power systems to match. The guns may not have been ready when they hit the water, but the ships are ready to take them when they are. And the guns have been under development for a while:
 
Yeah, the Lightning is...contentious. It's a bit difficult to resist going on about why it doesn't suck, but this is absolutely not the place.
 
In theory, new Des Moines class cruisers could be built today--the same Army arsenal that builds 155mm howitzers (Watervliet?) has the tooling and equipment to build new 8"/55 guns because the Navy basically begged them not to scrap it after we retired the eight-inch howitzers, just in case something forced us to put the Mark 71 MCLWG into production, and the armor thicknesses are comparable to those for armored fighting vehicles and aircraft carrier flight decks, so you don't run into the same "nobody can supply this shit any more" issues you do with battleships.

However, their machinery plant is something that the Navy purged itself of the last non-nuclear relatives back in the 90s, so training up a new generation of snipes to run it would be difficult at best; they are highly manpower-intensive and have poor habitability compared by modern Navy standards, making them both expensive to run and difficult to get people to crew (remember, all-volunteer service now); and while they're not as expensive as a battleship would be, their construction, even at the original balls-to-the-wall wartime schedule, was supposed to take two years. (In reality, the end of the war intervened and construction slowed greatly; they were commissioned two years behind schedule.) Also, we don't know how the levelling effect would affect them--would they be seen as the best heavy cruisers in the world? Second-best, after the Kirovs? Horribly outdated and the worst CAs in the world due to the age of the design? Somewhere in-between? We just don't know--and $653,256,780.81 (and that's just the original 1945 cost, not counting modern electronics and commo gear needed to operate with the fleet today, adjusted for inflation; you could probably at least double that to fully outfit one with that stuff) per ship is one hell of a big gamble on something where we don't know what the results will be.

Now, that shouldn't be taken as my saying it shouldn't happen--hell, I've advocated the USN building modernized versions of them in this thread before. But I am pointing out the problems that would be inherent in doing so, and which would be raised when their production is proposed.
 
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