ruh>Кто быстрее подавит оборону на побережье - 9х16' или 36х8'? Только не забудьте про время перезарядки.
Ladno, len' vam - citiruyu:
The firepower of the battleships nine 16-inch guns is well known, and new sabot shells allow ranges in excess of 100 miles. Naval guns have proven especially effective during past wars because they fire shells like bullets, e.g. faster than the speed of sound. While radar and the noise of aircraft, missiles, howitzers, and mortars provide time to take cover, a battleship can explode nine 2000 lbs shells on a target without warning.
Defense contractors have pushed the idea that million dollar Tomahawk missiles can provide precision firepower, ignoring the fact that only 288 Tomahawks were fired during the entire Persian Gulf war because of a lack of suitable targets, while battleships fired over 1000 $500 16-inch shells with twice the explosive power. The Navy could truly leap ahead by modifying the battleships to use liquid propellant rather than the manpower intensive "powder bag" system used for over 100 years.
Their presence means any landing force (Marine or Army Airborne) can be supported with serious firepower that stays close to shore. Can you visualize an Aegis cruiser sitting a kilometer off a hostile shore, daring an enemy to fire at it? With two 5" guns and no armor plate? Four .51 caliber heavy machine guns would cause $100 million in damage in less than a minute, if you were LUCKY. If you weren't, those guns would detonate exposed Harpoon missiles and punch through the hull to detonate the warheads of the SM-2 or Tomahawk missiles. Then you have a real debacle for the Navy to explain. To prevent this, the small ships will stay too far out at sea to be harmed by machineguns. But rocket salvoes from cheap launchers would do the same thing, so the ships have to be over the horizon. And if they are over the horizon, there is no NAVAL PRESENCE
Missiles are high value target weapons. You can't fire million dollar missiles at hundred dollar targets for long, and expect to have any war reserve left. You can't get missiles off an assembly line at 100 per day. You CAN'T AFFORD to fire 1,000 Tomahawks/Harpoons at a Third World army. You CAN AFFORD to build massive shotgun rounds for battleships that cover a large portion of the sky with 10mm steel balls and 3" flechettes to knock down distant missiles. You can afford to sabot 1000 # 11" rounds for a 16" gun to give you 80 km range, even if you use Army Copperhead technology for the 11" rounds. A half-ton 11" round is the same weight as a Tomahawk warhead; it moves faster with more metal for fragmentation and can be built with a penetrator nose that would drive deep into anything before detonating.
If sanity takes hold in the Pentagon and two battleships are recommissioned, the Marine Corps or the ARMY should fund further firepower upgrades. I'd have the Tomahawks removed and replaced with 6 MLRS "six packs" and 2 ATACMS missiles per side. Why? MLRS and ATACMS are ground support weapons, not strategic attack systems. I'd keep Tomahawks on the little ships. I'd double the number of Phalanx 20mm Close In Weapons Systems to 8, at least double their magazine capacity to 6,000 rounds, and play with some other anti-missile/rocket/torpedo/mine ideas for more cheap protection. The center 5" mount on each side would be replaced with a Slammer Six style 70mm HYDRA rocket launcher that can fire 240 17 # HE warheads into six football fields within 10 km of the ship in less than a minute. And the cost is peanuts, compared to virtually anything else. That's more weight of metal (240 x 17 # = 4080 #) than a single AP 16" round (2900 #) or 2 HE 16" rounds (1900 # each). It's far more then any salvo of 5" rounds (4080 divided by 70 = 58 rounds) could hope to be delivered in a timely fashion.