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 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah - that would be a larger scale engagement. I would expect that an F-22 with ATS missles or smart bombs could easily sink the Yamato without the Yammy even knowing it was there.

Funny story. Modern missiles that are carried by fighters aren't actually designed to penetrate armor that thick, since nobody actually makes heavily armored ships anymore. The best we have are bunker busters which are only designed to hit stationary targets and not moving ships.

WW2 era battleship armor would actually be quite effective vs modern anti-ship missiles, which are designed to attack the unarmored ships of today. Battleships weren't retired because they were easily killed, they were retired because Carriers were better at threat projection

The F-22 of course would be in no danger of getting shot down, but it would be surprisingly ineffective vs a WW2 battleship. Battleships were designed to take a beating, and they do it very well.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah - that would be a larger scale engagement. I would expect that an F-22 with ATS missles or smart bombs could easily sink the Yamato without the Yammy even knowing it was there.

Funny story. Modern missiles that are carried by fighters aren't actually designed to penetrate armor that thick, since nobody actually makes heavily armored ships anymore. The best we have are bunker busters which are only designed to hit stationary targets and not moving ships.

WW2 era battleship armor would actually be quite effective vs modern anti-ship missiles, which are designed to attack the unarmored ships of today. Battleships weren't retired because they were easily killed, they were retired because Carriers were better at threat projection

The F-22 of course would be in no danger of getting shot down, but it would be surprisingly ineffective vs a WW2 battleship. Battleships were designed to take a beating, and they do it very well.

I was thinking it might need a smart bomb / bunker buster. Which if it was on an anti ship mission it would have. I figured our anti ship missiles today might have the punch required though - you are probably right though.

Sadly, modern naval doctrine is basically if your ship gets hit its out of commission. So nobody bothers with armor, and thus its a self-fulfilling prophecy.

An interesting tidbit is that the US navy has never lost a battleship at sea in actual naval combat, and not for lack of effort by the Japanese. The US navy however has lost 5 Carriers in actual combat.

Given the US's sadly low stockpiles, it would be possible that the F-22 might run out of bombs before it successfully sank the Yamato.

Battleships armor is very impressive, it took nearly 40 combined aerial torpedo and bomb hits to sink Musashi and hundreds of planes were sent in to sink Yamato for instance, while Bismark sustained over 400 shell and torpedo hits before sinking.

That said, I imagine modern 2000lb JDAM's being dropped with orders of magnitude more precision through the top deck would make short work of most such vessels rather than slinging shells at armor belts over a full foot thick or dive bombers hoping to land *any* hit.

Depends. Can JDAMs hit a moving target with precision? I don't think they've ever been used against a moving target before. Cause with ship like this taking evasive maneuvers you'd have to correct for a moving target, in addition to having to hit a specific place on the ship to hit a weak spot(which is still going to be heavily armored).

 Grey Templar wrote:
Depends. Can JDAMs hit a moving target with precision? I don't think they've ever been used against a moving target before. Cause with ship like this taking evasive maneuvers you'd have to correct for a moving target, in addition to having to hit a specific place on the ship to hit a weak spot(which is still going to be heavily armored).

Well I know our guided munitions can be dropped before you even have your target and then redirected with their guide fins to a target. So hitting a moving target seems to be within their abilities. Hitting a ship in a turn would probably be more difficult - at least the first hit from an F-22 would not be in maneuvers though.

The first guided bomb one-shot a battleship. It is not particularly hard to hit a battleship, and I imagine modern bunker busters are much more precise than an experimental bomb with WW2 tech.

Of course, a bunker buster would be a gross overkill even against a battleship.

It is true that current missiles are not designed to sink battleships, but that's because there aren't battleships to sink. No one wants to built a new battleship as that would only be a pretext for someone else to build anti-armor missiles.

And there is another problem, battleships are incredibly easy to cripple, because there are things that are impossible to armor.

For example: both Bismark and Yamato needed a lot of firepower to be sunk, but both were easily crippled.

 Grey Templar wrote:


WW2 era battleship armor would actually be quite effective vs modern anti-ship missiles, which are designed to attack the unarmored ships of today. Battleships weren't retired because they were easily killed, they were retired because Carriers were better at threat projection

And because modern torpedoes don't have to penetrate any armour to kill a ship. They just detonate below the keel, making the ship's own weight break the keel as there's suddenly a pocket of gas below it.

Oh, and nukes. Mostly the threat projection you mentioned at first, followed by stuff that's going to kill any ship, no matter how well armoured. It's just that the big stuff isn't used today because they're of such a nature that it'd have to be a pretty big war to roll them out. When's the last time two decently modern navies actually fought oneanother?

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah - that would be a larger scale engagement. I would expect that an F-22 with ATS missles or smart bombs could easily sink the Yamato without the Yammy even knowing it was there.

Funny story. Modern missiles that are carried by fighters aren't actually designed to penetrate armor that thick, since nobody actually makes heavily armored ships anymore. The best we have are bunker busters which are only designed to hit stationary targets and not moving ships.

WW2 era battleship armor would actually be quite effective vs modern anti-ship missiles, which are designed to attack the unarmored ships of today. Battleships weren't retired because they were easily killed, they were retired because Carriers were better at threat projection

The F-22 of course would be in no danger of getting shot down, but it would be surprisingly ineffective vs a WW2 battleship. Battleships were designed to take a beating, and they do it very well.

Until you put a nuke on it of course. Alternatively if someone actually started making battleships again, the technology to make penetrators us available and could be made in days, if not hours. Antitank missiles would easily penetrate.

Alternatively b52 strike for fun and giggles.

 Frazzled wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah - that would be a larger scale engagement. I would expect that an F-22 with ATS missles or smart bombs could easily sink the Yamato without the Yammy even knowing it was there.

Funny story. Modern missiles that are carried by fighters aren't actually designed to penetrate armor that thick, since nobody actually makes heavily armored ships anymore. The best we have are bunker busters which are only designed to hit stationary targets and not moving ships.

WW2 era battleship armor would actually be quite effective vs modern anti-ship missiles, which are designed to attack the unarmored ships of today. Battleships weren't retired because they were easily killed, they were retired because Carriers were better at threat projection

The F-22 of course would be in no danger of getting shot down, but it would be surprisingly ineffective vs a WW2 battleship. Battleships were designed to take a beating, and they do it very well.

Until you put a nuke on it of course. Alternatively if someone actually started making battleships again, the technology to make penetrators us available and could be made in days, if not hours. Antitank missiles would easily penetrate.

Alternatively b52 strike for fun and giggles.

In think Yamato could probably shoot down a B52? Anyone got the AA ceiling on Yamato AA guns?

Nope - 5 inch AA max range 31k feet. B52 Max bombing altitude 50k.

 Just Tony wrote:

Also, your average Starfleet ship is roughly 150 meters in length, so I'd say your description of close quarters combat is off a bit. In Wrath of Khan the fighting in the initial skirmish was close because Khan was setting up an ambush of sorts. Look at the rest of the battle, the ships are no closer than 5 ship lengths to each other until the Enterprise rises after the Reliant passes over. THEN the shots are happening at about that distance. Other episodes and movies have shots fired at distance as well.

Heck, let's call it ten ship lengths. 1500m/ a kilometer and a half. Big deal, an Imperial Star Destroyer is that long.

The smaller star destroyers in the Clone Wars are shown firing at ships little more than dots on the screen they're so far off... and hitting them. Routinely.

And TIE fighters are shown to be pathetic enough that Luke and Han can shoot them down through manually aimed secondary batteries on the Millenium Falcon.

Trying to extrapolate stuff from on-screen performance is iffy at best.

 Vulcan wrote:

The smaller star destroyers in the Clone Wars are shown firing at ships little more than dots on the screen they're so far off... and hitting them. Routinely.

Yet an Imperial star destroyer can't kill the Falcon when it's right in front of it.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
And TIE fighters are shown to be pathetic enough that Luke and Han can shoot them down through manually aimed secondary batteries on the Millenium Falcon.

Those are the Falcon's primary batteries. It isn't a warship.

The Falcon had targeting computers, and a bunch of illegal modifications. Military grade stuff is commonplace on civilian ships in Star Wars.

Still, the turret guns on the Falcon, and the aiming mechanism, and the turrets on the Death Star and everything, really they are WW2 level technology with a dope old school wire-frame style electronic interface laid on top to make them look skiffy.

Nothing is automated. The fire director helps the gunner to aim his guns by calculating deflection, but he still actually traverses the turret and presses the trigger by hand.

People should ignore the older “battles” when it comes to Trek and Star Wars, the technology wasn’t there to make the battles look good and they had to make do with small budgets.

Look at prequels onwards and force awakens onwards, when they had the budget to make the battles more dynamic.

For Trek is mid season DS9 onwards

 dogma wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

The smaller star destroyers in the Clone Wars are shown firing at ships little more than dots on the screen they're so far off... and hitting them. Routinely.

Yet an Imperial star destroyer can't kill the Falcon when it's right in front of it.

Would you expect a Missouri class to hit a torpedo boat moving at max speed with it's 16" guns?

ISD-2's were battleships. They were designed to engage other battleships. Had the plot armor of the Falcon had them run into more common cruiser and frigate classes that the Imperium used, it would have been a much different story. Even the CR-90, shown in the opening scene of A New Hope, would have likely wrecked the Falcon in the hands of a less competent pilot, because they were designed to deal with small ships.


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 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
And TIE fighters are shown to be pathetic enough that Luke and Han can shoot them down through manually aimed secondary batteries on the Millenium Falcon.

Trying to extrapolate stuff from on-screen performance is iffy at best.

The Falcon was illegally modified with top of the line anti-fighter quad laser cannons. Those were designed specifically to destroy intercepting fighters, because that's what a smuggler is most likely going to run into when he's trying to sneak onto a planet.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Depends. Can JDAMs hit a moving target with precision? I don't think they've ever been used against a moving target before. Cause with ship like this taking evasive maneuvers you'd have to correct for a moving target, in addition to having to hit a specific place on the ship to hit a weak spot(which is still going to be heavily armored).

The plane also dropped a 1,000-pound guided bomb from 50,000 feet while flying at Mach 1.5 and hit a moving target 24 miles away during a test in New Mexico this summer.

https://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2006/11/22/US-orders-two-dozen-raptors-for-2010/UPI-51851164210418/

If top-of-the-line anti-fighter weapons are aimed by hand that's not really helping Star Wars' case, is it?

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
And TIE fighters are shown to be pathetic enough that Luke and Han can shoot them down through manually aimed secondary batteries on the Millenium Falcon.

Trying to extrapolate stuff from on-screen performance is iffy at best.

But it's all we have, so....


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 dogma wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

The smaller star destroyers in the Clone Wars are shown firing at ships little more than dots on the screen they're so far off... and hitting them. Routinely.

Yet an Imperial star destroyer can't kill the Falcon when it's right in front of it.

Assuming, of course, that killing the Falcon was it's goal instead of capturing it.

 djones520 wrote:

Would you expect a Missouri class to hit a torpedo boat moving at max speed with it's 16" guns?

I'm sure an Iowa class couldn't hit a torpedo boat with it's 16" guns, but such vessels have other guns; the large battery of 5" DP guns, the AA battery. And really what we're talking about in a Falcon v. ISD fight is anti-aircraft capacity.

 djones520 wrote:

ISD-2's were battleships. They were designed to engage other battleships.

The Iowa is not a great example, then, as it was designed to escort carriers.

 Vulcan wrote:

Assuming, of course, that killing the Falcon was it's goal instead of capturing it.

The Empire already blew up a planet, capture doesn't seem like something that was on it's mind.

Maybe it was on Vader's mind? Maybe he sensed a connection with Leia? But that's nerd speculation, not something played out on screen.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
If top-of-the-line anti-fighter weapons are aimed by hand that's not really helping Star Wars' case, is it?

Well, when Star Trek's computer aimed weapons have a hard time hitting a capital ship at under a kilometer, I think it's a wash.


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 dogma wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

Assuming, of course, that killing the Falcon was it's goal instead of capturing it.

The Empire already blew up a planet, capture doesn't seem like something that was on it's mind.

Maybe it was on Vader's mind? Maybe he sensed a connection with Leia? But that's nerd speculation, not something played out on screen.

Blowing up Alderaan was a demonstration of political will. Capturing Rebel ships scurrying away from a Rebel base is about intelligence, in the military sense of the term.

 dogma wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

Would you expect a Missouri class to hit a torpedo boat moving at max speed with it's 16" guns?

I'm sure an Iowa class couldn't hit a torpedo boat with it's 16" guns, but such vessels have other guns; the large battery of 5" DP guns, the AA battery. And really what we're talking about in a Falcon v. ISD fight is anti-aircraft capacity.

 djones520 wrote:

ISD-2's were battleships. They were designed to engage other battleships.

The Iowa is not a great example, then, as it was designed to escort carriers.

 Vulcan wrote:

Assuming, of course, that killing the Falcon was it's goal instead of capturing it.

The Empire already blew up a planet, capture doesn't seem like something that was on it's mind.

Maybe it was on Vader's mind? Maybe he sensed a connection with Leia? But that's nerd speculation, not something played out on screen.

The ISD-2's had no anti-fighter guns. All they had were capital weapons. Tons of Turbolasers Turrets and Ion Cannons, but no laser cannons. That's what the tie fighter complements were for.

Now if you want to ask the why didn't they launch 24 tie fighters to engage and destroy the Falcon, that would be a better question, but it's very well established that small ships were the achilles heel of the ISD's, because the only defence they had were their mediocre TIE complements..

 Vulcan wrote:

Blowing up Alderaan was a demonstration of political will. Capturing Rebel ships scurrying away from a Rebel base is about intelligence, in the military sense of the term.

The Empire had no problem destroying transports in the escape from Hoth, over half of them; it wasn't looking for intelligence.

 djones520 wrote:

The ISD-2's had no anti-fighter guns. All they had were capital weapons. Tons of Turbolasers Turrets and Ion Cannons, but no laser cannons. That's what the tie fighter complements were for.

But the ISD-2 chasing the Falcon managed to hit it, and the Death Star shot down quite a few fighters with its capital scale guns.

The Death Star, as a space station, has point defense turrets for anti-fighter support. ISDs on the other hand are purpose built to take on other capital ships. At least the early ISDs anyway. Later ISDs had more well rounded armaments, in addition to other ship designs like the Raider which were specifically anti-fighter.

And of course if you have a lot of guns you'll eventually hit something. So its not surprising the Falcon got hit occasionally, though remember they did have explicit orders to capture the Falcon so they were holding back.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Death Star, as a space station, has point defense turrets for anti-fighter support. ISDs on the other hand are purpose built to take on other capital ships. At least the early ISDs anyway. Later ISDs had more well rounded armaments, in addition to other ship designs like the Raider which were specifically anti-fighter.

If you Google "turbo laser" the first image return is a turret from the trench run. The point defense guns the Death Star had showed up for half a second in ANH and, going by Wookiepedia, it only had 2,500 of them: as opposed to 15,000 turbo lasers.

Also they're not housed in turrets, they fired out of gun ports.

 Grey Templar wrote:

And of course if you have a lot of guns you'll eventually hit something. So its not surprising the Falcon got hit occasionally, though remember they did have explicit orders to capture the Falcon so they were holding back.

If they were holding back, why weren't they using ion cannons? An ISD-2 has 60 of them.

Yes... the Death Star was firing that the fighters flying in a pretty concentrated area. Not really ducking and weaving in the entirety of space.

Also, you're getting to the point where you are pointing at plot armor as a reasonable response to the argument, in regards to the Falcon situation.

Had it been any other smuggler crew flying that ship, that ISD would have deployed its wing of Tie Fighters, and destroyed it in a heart beat.

 djones520 wrote:

Had it been any other smuggler crew flying that ship, that ISD would have deployed its wing of Tie Fighters, and destroyed it in a heart beat.

Is that why Lando and Nien Nunb blew up Death Star 2?

 djones520 wrote:
Yes... the Death Star was firing that the fighters flying in a pretty concentrated area. Not really ducking and weaving in the entirety of space.

So it was using it's 5" DP turbo lasers to knock out the attacking Rebel fighters? I'm cool with that interpretation, but it does mean ISD-2s kind of suck.

 dogma wrote:
I'm cool with that interpretation, but it does mean ISD-2s kind of suck.

Well lets get one thing straight here. Both Star Trek and Star Wars suck pretty badly on the military competence side of things, in the grand scheme of Sci-fi military-ness. Its just that Star Trek sucks more.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Well lets get one thing straight here. Both Star Trek and Star Wars suck pretty badly on the military competence side of things, in the grand scheme of Sci-fi military-ness. Its just that Star Trek sucks more.

Star Wars builds immense vessels that can be taken out by suicidal fighter pilots, Star Trek builds vessels with auxiliary bridges.

Do ISDs have any rear firing weapons?

If not the manuverability of Star Fleet ships gives them another edge, above and beyond their obviously superior weaponry.