[HorseSoldier]

1) The USN has one nuclear submarine left - and its implied very very much that they were lost to enemy action, not to maintenance issues.

Sorry but that means that all the Permits, Sturgeons, Los Angeles (except Corpus Christi), Tridents, etc.. are gone - basically no chance of that at all - it would take the Russians, British, French, Chinese and every one else in the world to hit the USN that bad - and remember a bunch of USN bases didnt get hit in the nuclear exchange so those bases would have spare parts, etc.. available to repair ships

That is what it means. Put another way, in the T2K universe, the Soviet naval threat + attrition + anything else (bad luck, whatever) is such that the Soviets inflicted pretty brutal losses on the USN (while being largely exterminated themselves).

That's the plot and backstory in the game. It's also pretty unrealistic, knowing what we know now, to think that the Soviets could have sustained massive conventional warfare on two fronts for a couple years without economic collapse. And we now know they didn't have any plans for war in Europe that didn't involve plastering NATO forces from the get go with nuclear weapons.

In short, it's an alternate universe, where things didn't work out the way they did in real life.

2) The whole "last battle of the Virginia" is completely unrealistic - read it and then try to have it make sense with any weapon the Russians ever mounted on a ship

Agreed. Quality of later T2K supplements was not nearly as good as the early ones in a lot of ways.

3) The fleet in the Persian Gulf that supposedly has been supporting Marine landings is way too small to land any kind of Marine force - you are talking two full divisions and all their support ships and all thats left is two ships? And we know that Frank Frey missed ships when he did his module because he forgot the whole French task force in the area.

The ships that are there are what's left -- and it's just as bare bones as heavy divisions with a couple dozen tanks and all the other familiar trappings of T2K orders of battle for land forces.

so if there are survivors there, there are survivors on the Pacific Coast

The combined naval forces available to the US and Canada in the T2K universe are inadequate to prevent the Soviets having an amphibious romp through southern/south eastern Alaska and down Canada's Pacific coast. That implies some serious casualties -- doesn't mean every last ship in the Pacific is gone but it implies very serious losses.

5) Maintenance - ships do take a lot of maintenance that is true - but it takes a lot to make a ship so out of whack its useless - your radar might not be working and your engines may only be able to put out half power but you still have a ship that can kick butt

Who does the work? Besides expenditures of spares and degradation or destruction of facilities, you also have to factor in the death or displacement of skilled labor.

So you've got an intact maintenance facility -- so what? How are you going to power it? Are you just going to ring up the work force who've fled the area looking for food and tell them their jobs are back on? How do you feed them once you consolidate them, assuming that works out.

The reality is that modern naval ships and their support infrastructure are very complex systems with numerous failure points in the mix. T2K assumes pretty much a worst case scenario where complex, modern systems of various sorts have failed.

6) Fuel - you can run a ship on oil that is about as bottom barrel as it gets - gunk that would ruin the engines on a tank or jet works just fine in a ship. Heck in a pinch you can run on unrefined oil if you have to on most ships - you wont get max efficiency or range but it will work

Where does it come from and how do you get it to where the vessels are located?

And, maybe a bigger question, why do you bother? It's not just the USN that is nearly extinct, but everybody else's navies as well. In a world of extremely limited resources, would you bother wasting fuel on a destroyer or save it for an alternative like barges or freighters to move around personnel and supplies -- or just to provide heat to make it through the winter?

7) Armaments

Lack of armaments could make many naval ships not as effective as they used to be. I.e. if you are out of torpedoes then your sub isnt going to do much but recon or maybe be able to lay mines. However there is a lot of ammo out there for the guns the USN has. And even if all they have left is their guns that makes them a lot more effective than a jury rigged gun on a sailing boat or cabin cruiser.

On the other hand, a cargo ship with a couple jury rigged autocannons and heavy machineguns is going to be a better asset for what you need a ship for in T2K than an ASW frigate or Aegis cruiser. If you only have the resources to keep either a warship or a cargo ship working, the best use of resources is going to be for the cargo ship given the minimal naval threat above the level of what real life Somali pirates can manage and the destruction of infrastructure and need to be able to move cargo and people around.