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Old 10-31-2019, 12:18 AM
RN7 RN7 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bash View Post
A battleship without escorts is a big expensive target. A battleship with escorts is a massive expense for a dozen mile radius of "fire support".

Modern amphibious forces have amphibious APCs, helicopters, drones, hovercraft, satellites, aircraft, and cruise missiles. No one is going to storm a beach with unmounted infantry in plywood boats anymore. Pounding a beach and a few miles inland with 16in shells isn't worth the effort.

I don't think China or anyone else will ever be building battleships in the conventional sense, but the title was a bit misleading. The article states that China could build a large surface warship of the size of the Russian Kirov Class. The Kirov's are missile cruisers but as big as some pre-WW2 battleships.

Such a warships could be used as a platform for new weapons or multiple weapons systems that would demand large vessel to carry them such as long-range anti-ship or anti-air missiles, hypersonic vehicles, unmanned craft of various types, railguns and energy weapons. The purpose of building such ships could be to use them as mobile platforms as part of a wider Chinese defence network linked with Chinese air and missile bases on the Chinese mainland and new islands fortresses that they are manufacturing in the South China Sea. Such ships could be used to keep US Navy warships away from the Chinese coast and important sea lanes that China is dependent on.

The Soviet's built the Kirov Class for a similar purpose to fend off NATO naval and air forces in the North Atlantic from approaching missile launching areas in the Arctic for Soviet SSBN's. They were fitted with state of the art anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles for their time. What their effectiveness is/was against NATO nuclear submarines is open to speculation, and the same speculation could be made against a Chinese variant.

However the new Chinese Type 055 missile destroyer is classified by the US navy as a missile cruiser. Physically it is larger in tonnage than either the Burke Class destroyer or a Ticonderoga Class cruiser, or any similar warship in any allied nations including Britain and Japan. Excluding aircraft carriers the only active surface warships bigger than a Type 055 are the Russian Kirov and the US Zumwalt Class destroyers. China is capable of designing and building larger ships, even as large as the Kirov although not with nuclear reactors.
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