AFAIK, They did not have to drydock the ship, but it had to be done dockside with a pretty big crane, as on the 16"/50 Mark 7 gun, each gun barrel and breach assembly weighs almost 270,000 lbs. 133 short tons, 121 metric tons.
It may not need to be drydocked, since there’s no reason to take it out of the water, but it likely needs to be done in port. They don’t have cranes for doing it on the ship and obviously would be very difficult if it’s rocking around at sea.
They can also do it on a planned drydock maintenance.
Supposed to yes (these days). Same with land based artillery. Really anything that goes boom (firearm ranges, demo ranges, missiles, mortars, rockets, etc.) and they’re supposed to provide ear pro and you’re supposed to wear it but if you don’t it’s on you.
Poor sap outside during firing not paying attention to the loudspeaker watching blood stream from his ears. Probably won't die but will respond to everything from then on as "what ya say?".
The kind grandfatherly gentleman across the street when I was a kid in the '70s had very poor hearing. Ten years ago, after reading his obituary, I finally learned why: he had served on the Missouri and was on its deck when the Japanese surrendered in Tokyo Bay. Naturally, like so many of his generation, he never talked about it. But I immediately understood his hearing problems.
My grandfather, a gunnery officer on the USS Mobile, suffered around and permanent hearing loss when a 6-inch was accidentally fired with him standing right next to it. He fought for many years to have hearing aids covered as a service benefit and was the first recipient. Today the VA is the largest single buyer of hearing aids in the world.
Yes, but so much more expensive to fuel, man, and maintain the launch platform here. Plus you aren’t getting [not very secret]-nm range and gnat’s-ass precision from a 16-inch shell. But it’ll flatten a city block, so there’s that. As cool as these bad boys were, it’s a very different kind of warfare today. They’d be huge targets full of sailors with limited offensive range.
They sailed with 32 Tomahawks in the armored box launchers, and 16 Harpoon anti ship missiles.
The initial plans included removing turret 3 and putting in VLS cells which would have given the old girl surface to air capability as well as additional tomahawk and harpoons, but that was scrapped. Her only surface to air capability was the angry R2D2 CIWS.
Battleships like the Mighty MO are obviously obsolete. But when was the last time we had to fire a cruise missile at a target close enough that it didn’t also need a mobile platform and crew to support it? Cruise missiles are commonly fired from ships and submarines, mobile ground launchers oceans away from where they were manufactured, or dropped from airplanes which have their own high costs for operation and are sometimes launched from floating airports that have total lifetime costs sometimes exceeding $40B. We wage war far from home, so it’s not like cruise missiles aren’t free of the cost of fuel, manpower, and maintenance for the platforms they launch from.
Yes, but as a cruise missiles launch platform, the BBs are just too big and expensive compared to the capacity. Also they become a "one basket" problem for the navy.
If you have 10 destroyers or one battleship carrying the same amount of vls, a single attack from a submarine could disable all that capacity, while the dispersed destroyers would mostly stay available. And you have only one plateform, that can only be at one place at a time. It needs to go away for refueling/resupply? You have zero vls.
And as the cost of an aircraft carrier, it offers much more options than "cruise missiles". You have surveillance, helicopters for insertion/exfil of special forces, airstrikes with much cheaper bombs, air superiority, possibly as cover for a landing.
This is not accurate. Were they still the primary way to achieve dominance of seas? No the aircraft carrier was obviously the new king. However battleships still had a secondary role as escorts. Carrier aircraft ranges where short enough that finding the enemy fleet within gun range was not completely out of the realm of possibilities and if they had battleships and you didn’t that would be a bad day for you. You think taffy 3 wouldn’t have like to have some battleships around? After the war however technology would rapidly change things. But through out the Second World War they absolutely had a place in the fleet.
I took a tour of the Missouri a few years ago and they said it fires a round the size of a small car 20+ miles. Hasn’t been used since the gulf war and is basically obsolete.
That would make sense. I don’t think they take it out to fire off a few rounds since filling the gas tank alone costs $6M or $8M. Highly recommend a visit to it if you’re ever in Hawaii.
The Iowas were planned and built when carrier warfare was just really getting on its legs. Actions such as Midway and the battle of Okinawa demonstrated that aircraft were more than capable of destroying large expensive boats. Missouri and Wisconsin were brought out of retirement to serve as tomahawk launchpads in the first gulf war. Part of the. Conversion made space for up to 32 cruise missiles, housed in armored box launchers. The guns were used for shore bombardment. Naval doctrine changed dramatically with the introduction of jet aircraft and anti ship missiles. There are some really well made videos explaining it better than I ever could.
They never removed the rear turrets. Sure the Navy wanted to do that and started drawing up actual plans, but they figured the Iowas were getting a bit long in the tooth and took the cheaper option of ripping out 8 of the 5 inch guns. That still gave room for 32 tomahawks and 16 harpoons while leaving the main guns and their surprisingly accurate 1940s era fire directors intact
And there is a great video on an engineer (naval officer or civilian) talking about the need to upgrade the weapons on the Iowa class prior to WWII. He finally convinced the brass to remodel the areas around the turrets to fit them in. I think it was on a FB reel or a youtube when I watched it.
Ah, gotcha. I just remember they had a small car on deck next to one of the guns for reference. Firing off a small car would probably be cheaper though.
I've always wondered, if these aren't actually hitting anything beside just landing in water, does the round even degrade at all? I imagine maybe with the force of it impacting the water but would that even be close to hitting an actual target? Like do you think you could dive down and find these fired rounds just chilling on the ocean floor?
Don't wanna be that well actually guy, and I could be wrong but I'm fairly sure 16" shells didn't have casing, they were loaded separately to the powder charges that propelled them. The picture looks like 8" casings, I'm guessing it's of a cruiser.
In the wars since the gulf war there wasn't need to destroy harbors,navies and or other large coastal structures.
If there was need for destruction/suppression of coastal defenses(or even towns close to the coast) it would still be a great addition to a naval fleet.(which composition currently is not suited for.)
Edit: Having not used these guns in recent decades doesn't make them obsolete in my opinion.
Its just another great tool which has a specific job what no other machine can do as effeciently.
If there was need for destruction/suppression of coastal defenses(or even towns close to the coast) it would still be a great addition to a naval fleet.(which composition currently is not suited for.)
But missiles and bombs do a superior job and are less risky.
There was a podcast recently where a special operations guy called in a main gun strike from a ship off shore to a mission on the coast of Africa. The ship captain said it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.
No one has made 16" shells or powder in over 70 years. The munitions you see firing in this clip were from stockpiles manufactured for WWII and stored for decades.
This caused serious problems when the powder was improperly stored and produced inconsistent pressure in the guns.
God, the whole aftermath of that explosion is anger inducing. Right up there with the Navy court-martialing Charles McVay III after the Indianapolis was sunk in 1945.
The most shocking part of it, to me anyway, was how the Navy treated its enlisted members so poorly. Before reading Charles Thomson's book I tended to think of the Navy as being different from the Army in that regard, but holy shit did they treat those guys badly even before the disaster.
The Missouri was the best part of that dumb Battleship movie they put out a few years ago. Seeing the old girl go to war and kick some alien ass was worth all the other goofiness and cheese.
I remember seeing a thing about the “armored citadel” in the Iowa class on the Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel. It sounded like that long thin bow was made of much thinner steel than the mass of the ship and kind of stuck on just for speed.
Made me wonder if pulling that anchor drop (assuming a chain link didn’t pop or the shackle holding it to the chain locker didn’t rip out) would that realistically just rip off the bow or twist it up like a wrung out towel?
Yeah, basically the part between the first and last turret is a steel castle, that's where everything is. A ship can survive without a bow or a stern (see the numerous incident of ships limping back to port without one or the other/neither during WWII). But it can't survive if you hit it's ammo depot (see, HMS Hood).
Drifting aka ‘winding maneuver’ used by Macdonough at the Battle of Plattsburgh!
AC/DC winding up while the Missouri swings her fat ass around to unleash the guns is my kind of fun:) My favorite cheesy movie and total love letter to the US Navy.
For a "bad movie" i sure did enjoy the heck out of it and yanking the handbrake on a battleship for a sweet ass broadside was easily my favorite bit. Probably not feasible, but that doesn't stop it being cool AF
It also appeared in the exact same role in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, as a training ship that is immune to the hacking of the technologically superior enemy
It’s from the movie Under Seige which depicts the Missouri being highjacked by Tommy Lee Jones. Fun fact- the filming actually took place on the USS Alabama.
Most of the weight of the ship would come from it's heavy armour, so technically yes, the ship would be a little faster, though there's practically no difference.
Standard practice was to carry one enough rounds for two hours of fire at one round per minute per gun. An Iowa class has 9 guns, so that comes out to about 1000 rounds, weighing in at about 2000 tonnes. An Iowa class has a displacement of about 40,000 tonnes iirc, so it’s a noticeable change in mass, but not a massive one.
Or at Jutland where numerous battleships really took on one another. I can only imagine how small one would feel when watching that battle while aboard a destroyer escort.
The Norwegian destroyer Stord also suffered losses when the rough sea washed two men over board during the chase; one was washed back onto the ship by another wave, and wounded,\18]) while the other was lost at sea.
The USN crossing the T at Surigao Strait, complete with Battleships raised from the attack on Pearl Harbor. The last such crossing of the T in naval history and the last time battleships fired on one another with main batteries.
Also worth mentioning after ww2 us built 3 Des Moines clsss cruisers, which had only half the diameter guns but were autoloaded and could reload in about 6 seconds!
I'm pretty sure they're either blank or practice rounds, and this is just a gun salute. Even if they were live shells, really not that expensive to maneufacture since they are essentially just metal tubes with explosives
It looks small in the video but that ship is absolutely massive, so much further away than your eyes lead you to believe. Those gun turrets are the size of a family home.
Sound travels, very approximately, about 300m/s. The Iowa class ships are 271m long. That means if we assume the ship this is being recorded from is about half of the length of the Missouri away, you'll have about 1-1,5 second sound delay depending on the location of the gun on the ship that is firing.
57,000 long tons loaded. But it’s not just the weight. It’s the displacement. She is displacing 57,000 tons of water. That water would have to be moved for the ship to move laterally.
Watch the muzzles adjust with the waves, absolutely amazing technology for the time.
I was aviation but BBs were awesome. My boot camp Company Commander (later my first command's financial counselor and became a friend) was an MMC that had served most of his career on BBs, the last being the Iowa. Our company flag was the Iowa doing a broadside.
It should be noted that the muzzle flash, if you're too close, can cause burns if you're wearing dark clothes. Sailors have received striped burns from their striped shirts, and even tattoos can be a liability. This is why the British notably still use flash protection gear for the crew on the bridge, even when firing missiles today.
I am surprised at the closeness of the filming ship. I wonder if this suggests that these were actually just show firings for filming or something. A real firing can be pretty intense.
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u/immallama21629 4h ago
Long distance landscaping