I highly doubt it. Battleships are the exact wrong way of going about fighting Abyssals. Even assuming the Navy doesn't go for something like my
"drones paint targets while ships fire from safe distances" plan Battleships still have all the problem that caused their retirement.
At their height battleships served three roles:
- Shore Bombardment: With their mighty guns nothing could match the range or sheer destructive power of a battleship. This made them perfect for providing the initial artillery coverage for landing operations or just making any hostile coastal facilities go away. With aircraft capable of carrying bombs thousands of kilometers, cruise missiles capable of equal distances, and now destroyer grade railguns capable of reach over a hundred kilometers away battleships just can't compete.
- Anti-Air: Blistering with 49 Oerlikons, 80 Bofors, and 20 5" cannons an Iowa-class battleship could fill the sky with lead and make it a hellscape right out of a pilot's worst nightmares. Nowadays though fighters don't need to get that close, they can drop a missile from well behind the horizon (air launched Harpoons have 280km ranges) and that missile can cross from the horizon to the ship in under a minute.
- Anti-Battleship: One of the defining characteristics of battleships was the ability for their belts to absorb anything less then another battleship's main guns. Therefore the only way to fight a battleship was with another battleship. The raise of bombers (hitting the vulnerable decks), advances in torpedo and submarine technology, and the general trend for offense to outpace defense means that there were now a variety of cheaper alternatives to fighting a battleship then a battleship of your own.
The biggest problem however is that Abyssals aren't giant monsters that need big guns to wound and big armor to avoid being swatted. The reason modern day navy's didn't steamroll them is that Abyssals are basically immune to radar, the basis for basically all modern day guidance systems, and are mostly pretty small. As I understand it the Destroyers we faced are one of the few exceptions to Abyssals being roughly
human sized. Without precision radar technology hitting a human sized target at anything other then point blank range is incredibly difficult.
If you are going to try and pit non-magical technology against Abyssals the answer isn't bigger and nastier ships; it's high precision weaponry that doesn't rely on radar mounted on a cheap but disposable platform. Torpedo boats with either laser guided missiles or, if you can somehow power one, a railgun would be about the best design I can think of.
Of course this is all assuming you
want to try and fight with ships rather then shipgirls. Frankly speaking from a military perspective shipgirls are better in just about every way. Shipgirls are better offensively as due to their MSSB their radars work and their guns work as if targeting full sized ships rather then girl sized ones. Shipgirls are better defensively because their radars work so they are far less likely to be caught and they have era appropriate armor backed up by MSSB. Most importantly though Shipgirls are better
logistically and I'm not talking about how they can repair damage in
days instead of months/years.
The Zumwalt-class destroyer, thanks to it's awesome automation, requires less then
half the crew of a normal destroyer and yet still has a minimum complement of 130 crewmen. Even if every single one of those crewmen was paid the absolute bare minimum pay ($1,430.40/month for E-1s with < 4 months service) that would still clock in at $2,231,424 a year in pure wages. Throw in the cost of missiles (over 1 million each), bullets ($68,000 per Excalibur), maintenance (est. $500,000/year based on googling), and the cost gets even more ridiculous. Even if each and every shipgirl got a million dollar salary and cost another million in food/maintenance, both ridiculously beyond reasonable figures, that would still be less then just the personnel cost of the lowest crewed Destroyer.
The
only reason to keep human navy vessels running is
pride.
That being said I want to try and keep LBJ from sinking (because is there any other way we would go out except fighting?) as long as possible. Despite it not being the most logical or optimal move I want to keep fighting on as an outdated, because that is what
every non-shipgirl ship is now, destroyer against the odds. There are plenty of quests where we play as Shipgirls after all, this is the only one where we try and match shipgirls with a
ship.
