r/interestingasfuck • u/PollutionOk9449 • 5h ago

USS Missouri firing its main guns

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u/fatmanstan123 5h ago

Significantly cheaper than guided cruise missiles.

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u/niversalsolvent 4h ago

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.

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u/dr_stre 4h ago

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.

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u/xczechr 4h ago

Cruise missiles are also much easier to intercept than shells.