How accurate is your rifle at 34,000 yards?

[lencac]

Is anybody familiar with what is called the "coriolis effect". It's something that's not a factor in rifle shooting but is a factor for correction of targeting when shooting the "big guns". Just one more thing that is to be taken into consideration that I find astounding when realizing how accurate these things really are.
As far as sinking a full blown "battleship" if you have ever read some of the accounts of the damage these monsters have sustained and did not sink. Were they rendered inoperable? YES. But damn, think of the degree of violence involved in naval warfare.

 

[Tarvis]

280-350 rounds barrel life

I'm sure this is like the barrel life that bench rest shooters expect. These guns have to be super accurate or lives can be lost, so I'm willing to bet they aren't completely worn out at 350 rounds, just that accuracy is starting to go.

 

[Boris Barowski]

1 MOA
100 yards => 1.0471975511966 inches
1000 yards => 10.471975511966 inches
34000 yards => 356.047167406844 inches
34000 yards => 9.89019909 yards

if you group it inside a circle with a diameter of 9.89 yards, you should be shooting 1MOA at 34000 yards.

How they load a 16 inch gun : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJdinQQk1O8

 

[Old Grump]

I was on the Canberra in Nam and we were shooting 9 × 8"/55 guns. I saw the Jersey shoot 3 salvos from her aft turrets and sail away, her job done for that particular mission on that particular island. I never want to see anything like that again.

 

[everallm]

I'm sure I heard someone said a Glock could do better than this........

 

[ETH77]

They can do better than 34,000 yds

That # is 102,000 ft, or a little short of 20 miles. Using sabotted shells, a 16" gun can exceed 50 miles, with good (classified) accuracy.

I love it, throw a VW 50 miles and drop it in for a "brief visit".

 

[LaEscopeta]

The real danger to the old battlewagons would be torpedoes and mines.

And dive bombers.

The sides above the water line is where the thick armor is, and to keep battleships from being too top heavy and unstable at sea the decks had to be light. I think the Iowa class had wooden decks (teak?) to keep them light. Plus there has to be a lot of holes in the deck, to let air down to the boilers and let smoke out. WWII dive bombers put a lot of bombs into the bellies of battleships and sunk their fair share, include several of the 8 US battleships at pearl harbor, and the British battleship the Prince of Wales.

I would think a modern ballistic missile, with a guided warhead could go through the deck of a Iowa class as well as a WWII era bomb.

 

[theotherwaldo]

My father served as a forward observer in Korea after the Inchon landing and during the retreat from the Chinese border. According to him, on the few occasions that he could call direct naval gunfire from the 16 inchers, corrections were on the order of fifty feet. Finer control was pointless because of the radius of the blast effect. Even relatively tiny targets like reinforced railway tunnels and ridgetop roads were easily taken out by "near-misses" that came within sixteen yards.

So two minutes of angle was usually sufficient.

 

[SSN Vet]

Plus the Battleships would be totally immune to anti shipping missiles.

Hmmm!

TLAM-D

 

[benEzra]

And dive bombers.

The sides above the water line is where the thick armor is, and to keep battleships from being too top heavy and unstable at sea the decks had to be light. I think the Iowa class had wooden decks (teak?) to keep them light. Plus there has to be a lot of holes in the deck, to let air down to the boilers and let smoke out. WWII dive bombers put a lot of bombs into the bellies of battleships and sunk their fair share, include several of the 8 US battleships at pearl harbor, and the British battleship the Prince of Wales.

I would think a modern ballistic missile, with a guided warhead could go through the deck of a Iowa class as well as a WWII era bomb.

No, the Iowa's decks (like other 20th century battleships) were designed to keep out long-range shells from other battleships, which would tend to hit the TOP of the ship rather than the sides.

http://www.battleship.org/html/Articles/IowaClass/Armor.htm

The deck consists of three parts, the bomb deck, the main armor deck, and the splinter deck. The bomb deck is 1.5 inches STS plate, the main armor deck is 4.75 inches Class B armor laid on 1.25 inches STS plate and the splinter deck is 0.625 inches STS plate. The bomb deck is designed to detonate general purpose bombs on contact and arm armor piercing bombs so they will explode between the bomb deck and the main armor deck. Within the immune zone, the main armor deck is designed to defeat plunging shells which may penetrate the bomb deck. The splinter deck is designed to contain any fragments and pieces of armor which might be broken off from the main armor deck.

The teak decking is to keep the surface cool enough to walk on in the hot sun. The main structure of the decks was designed to stop 16" armor-piercing shells, and was most assuredly not made of wood.

BTW, check out the thickest armor on the ship (conning tower), from the same site:

17.3 inches of armor plate. Wow...

 

[Coronach]

Yeah, modern anti-ship cruise missiles, even the slightly older Soviet stuff (which had some MONSTER warheads), are not going to sink an Iowa outright. They might render her unable to complete her mission, but she's probably not going to sink, even after absorbing a bunch of hits. modern, thin-skinned combatants would be rendered a mission kill with one hit, most likely, and may well be lost.

The difference is that modern warships have active means to defend themselves. The reactivated battleships had point-defenses (CIWS), and relied on other ships to shield them from modern threats (carrier aircraft to keep literally everything at bay, subs and destroyers to hunt down enemy subs, cruisers and destroyers to deal with air threats).

Basically, you were spending a whole lot of money to show the flag in spectacular manner and bombard shore targets. That's it- everything else could be done as well, or better, by something that cost less money.

And yeah, I'd still love to have them back.

Mike

PS They're not gone quite- Wisconsin is still in reserve and able to be mobilized.

 

[Dr.Mall Ninja]

i knew i should not have slept in math class

 

[rondog]

I love those YouTube videos of the Iowa class guns being fired! It's a shame they're not in service anymore. At least I don't think they're active, are they?

 

[lightweight]

My ship USS Nassau (LHA-4)has 5-inch/54caliber intermediate class,
Only 25,900 yds x 75 lb projectile.
21 rds x 3 mounts

The Navy was down sizing I guess.

Pic of a pic...



http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=QpXjshw_eT8&feature=related

 

[akodo]

Now time to find a bigger powder measure, as the Lee one I've got isn't going to meter those 2" long grains real well.

just get some chinese laborers that are good at counting. Don't even need tweezers for 2" long grains

 

[akodo]

It seems to me a single 12 to 16 inch gun on a cruiser or destroyer would still be a good idea. Once installed it is a very cost effective weapon even with 'smart' shells, and even moreso with 'dumb' shells.

 

[Cosmoline]

I've wondered about that myself. I remember checking out the USS Bunker Hill, the new one with the missles, when it was in Juneau. It was odd to see so little *there*. No visible guns, just some odd shaped LEGO-structures of uncertain function on a hull. I wonder if the thing has any real defense for low-tech attacks. Maybe that's why the guy was there with an M-14 keeping people 500 meters away. It just seemed strange to see such a fancy piece of hardware needing to be protected by a guy with a rifle. The old battle wagons were bristling with machine guns and cannons of every type. They also had enough side armor to ward off any suicide attack this side of a kamikazee.

 

[oneshooter]

It seems to me a single 12 to 16 inch gun on a cruiser or destroyer would still be a good idea. Once installed it is a very cost effective weapon even with 'smart' shells, and even moreso with 'dumb' shells.

USS Alaska

Displacement 27,000 Tons, Dimensions, 808' 6" (oa) x 90' 9" x 31' 9" (Max)
Armament 9 x 12"/50 12 x 5/38AA, 56 x 40mm 34 x 20mm, 4 AC
Armor, 9" Belt, 12 4/5" Turrets, 1 2/5" +4" +5/8" Decks, 10 3/5" Conning Tower.
Machinery, 150,000 SHP; G.E. Geared Turbines, 4 screws
Speed, 33 Knots, Crew 1517.
Operational and Building Data
Keel laid on 17 DEC 1941 at New York Shipbuilding Corporation, Camden, NJ
Launched 15 AUG 1943
Commissioned 17 JUN 1944
Decommissioned 17 FEB 1947

Oneshooter
Livin in Texas

 

[trstafford]

Durability of BB

The British ship which was damaged in by Argentina's Exocet missile was made of aluminum if I remember correctly. The Brits have stopped that practice now. One of the down falls of BB in WWII was susceptible to aircraft attack, the phalanx weapon system retrofit solved that problem and would take care of any missile attack issue.

Barrel life with the latter improvements to powder and liner gives them an extremely long barrel life. How do I make my high intensity rifles last that long?

 

[JustRick]

I saw a video of an Australian submarine shooting an American Mark 48 torpedo at an obsolete destroyer. There is no reason to spend a ton of bucks on a gun platform. I'm with modern Navy thinking -- build big container ships and then load containers with mission-specific weapons and sensor packages. If you're going to lose hulls to submarine attacks, you might as well make them cheap hulls.

EDITED: Found the link. When large torpedoes explode under the keel, no amount of armor belting will help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV8M...ian-torpedo-test/2040776937/?icid=VIDURVENT11. Yeah, I know the double bottom of a battleship is tougher than the destroyer in the video. Picture four wire-guided torpedoes going off under the keel of a multi-zillion dollar battleship with a crew of 2,000.

 

[Coronach]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The British ship which was damaged in by Argentina's Exocet missile was made of aluminum if I remember correctly. The Brits have stopped that practice now. One of the down falls of BB in WWII was susceptible to aircraft attack, the phalanx weapon system retrofit solved that problem and would take care of any missile attack issue.

The Sheffield had an aluminum superstructure that they thought contributed to her loss, but IIRC they later decided it was a non-issue. The fact that she took a hit with a very potent ASM in a space vital for damage control had a much larger effect.

As to the BB's being good at air defense, no. The CIWS stands for Close In Weapons System, and the first two letters in the acronym are vital for understanding how it works. It is designed to shoot down missiles, period. Oh, it will shoot down an aircraft, sure, but in a combat situation no enemy is going to fly an aircraft that close to it. It is a last-ditch defense against "leakers", that being any missile that has gotten past the screening ships (AEGIS cruisers and destroyers that actually have good air defenses). With a total of four mounts, an Iowa could probably handle a missile or two, if she didn't get unlucky. However, the key to overwhelming point defenses is to have multiple missiles arriving on target simultaneously, so any good opponent would try to do just that.

(Note: we haven't fought a good opponent at sea since 1945. The last navy that could hope to cause a real problem for the USN in an all-out fight was the Soviet navy, and the Russian navy of today is still a ghost of its former self. Oh, could a smaller force get lucky? Sure. Stark and Cole are prime examples of how. Diesel subs are another. But we can't gear everything up for dealing with yokels in motorboats, because China is doing everything possible to turn out a blue-water, power-projection navy, and Russia won't be chilling out for much longer, either)

The BBs had as good a last ditch defense system as you could want, but they completely lacked any other air defense (SAMs). Of course, her advantage is that a typical (Exocet, Silkworm) ASM or two into the ship is mostly an issue for the poor seaman tasked with painting the hull on the next watch.

Mike

 

[Coronach]

I've wondered about that myself. I remember checking out the USS Bunker Hill, the new one with the missles, when it was in Juneau. It was odd to see so little *there*. No visible guns, just some odd shaped LEGO-structures of uncertain function on a hull. I wonder if the thing has any real defense for low-tech attacks. Maybe that's why the guy was there with an M-14 keeping people 500 meters away. It just seemed strange to see such a fancy piece of hardware needing to be protected by a guy with a rifle. The old battle wagons were bristling with machine guns and cannons of every type. They also had enough side armor to ward off any suicide attack this side of a kamikazee.

The 5" guns (1 fore, 1 aft) will deal with anything motorboat sized, easily. I imagine the CIWS could be targeted at surface threats as well. Anything small would just cease to be, if it could. Plus, the USN uses the M242 Bushmaster chain gun, and IIRC the Ticos carry two or four of them.

The real weaponry is below decks. All those hatches in the deck fore and aft of the superstructure? That's where the death and mayhem is.

Mike

ETA: looks like the CIWS cannot be aimed at surface threats, according to wikipedia (so we know it's true). The Bushmasters would handle any sort of low-tech threat easily, though. If they couldn't, you dial up Mr. 5-Inch and make the bad guy go away.

 

[jerkface11]

Yup the 5inch guns would more than deal with the Iranian suicide speedboat "navy". Of course one of the battle ships wouldn't even have to shoot them.

 

[georgeky]

A top Russian Admiral was once asked if there was anything he feared. His answer was Yes an Iowa class BB. Said he had nothing to fight them with.

All Iowa's were decomissioned after the Gulf War. They were stricken from the Navy register a few years ago and donated as museum ships. We can still call them back if needed in the future. There is an estimated 60 years of hull life left on them We do still maintain new barrels and ammo for them. Last I heard we had about 16,000 rounds for the 16 inchers on hand.


The USS New Jersey BB-62 is at Camden, NJ as a museum ship. She is the most decorated BB, and the most decorated ship still in existence.

The USS Missouri BB-63(Mighty MO) is at Pearl harbor standing guard over the Arizona as a museum ship'

The USS IOWA BB-61 is in the river above San Fransisco waiting to be turned into a museum.

The USS Wisconsin BB-64(WisKY) is at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum in Norfolk, VA She is the longest of the BB's. She ran over a frigate and damaged her bow. The USS KY(BB-66) was in dry dock and never completed so they removed the bow from the KY and put it on the Wisconsin. It is now a few inches longer than any other BB. That is were the WisKy name came from.

The USS KY(BB-66) and the USS Illinois(BB-65) were scrapped. The KY was at about 90% completion and the IL was around 20%. WWII ended and neither were completed.

The Iowa's are the greatest war ships to ever sail and they should still be in service. No other war ship ever built can do what they can. One Iowa can put more ordinance on target in 24 hours than 2 or 3 carriers can. They can resupply their battle group while under way and can even make their own replacment parts. Reagan had them re fitted and 32 Tomahawk cruise missles were added to their arsenal. Giving them an effective range of 7 to 800 miles.

Armor on the Conning tower is about the same (17+ inches) as the gun turrets. They have taken broadsides from missles, torpedo's, planes, and whatever with none ever being sunken or put out of service.

 

[Samuel Adams]

Bump for bringing the Iowa Class out of retirement.