Imagine an Artillery target, just the other side of a steep hill. can do everything it can and more! Now a submarine fitted with this system that just requires it to surface, fire and duck back down again would be useful, but seawater and electricity? Hmmm, fried sailors! Other ships of which can fire their own cruise missiles or send out helicopters or stay outside of 200 miles and scream for aircraft or submarines to do the job for them.Ī huge railgun firing ship sounds scary, but the weapon is likely to take up the whole ship, won't be hugely effective and so it will need to be defended by other ships, best of all by an aircraft carrier which. Couple that with the fact that the projectiles will not be explosive (other than just travelling very fast) it makes this technology useless for anything other than taking out other ships.
The Chinese strategy for countering US aircraft carriers (well known by everyone) is to fire a lot of short range ballistic missiles. Which brings me to range, 200miles on a ship is still not enough. So as long as the land artillery has means of determining their current location they are dead meat.īeing hit by one of those things would hurt! Is Lewis proposing to aim a large, several tons worth of railgun in a manner to take out aircraft? I think they had better stick to smaller and faster firing weapons or better still self guiding ones! By the way, lots of aircraft can fire cruise missiles from about 200 miles out, 10 aircraft, say with 2 missiles each? Not good odds for the railgun carrying dreadnought which will be back to using point defence systems.
However the time they wasted on Ezel and the scrap with the mine squadrons at Kassar costed them the overall victory as they have expended enough ammunition and fuel to have no choice but to retreat instead of facing the core of the Russian fleet pulling out of Helsinki.Īs far as Gallipoli, if the coastal batteries were such a pushover the mine laying crew would have never ever had the chance to lay those mines.Īs far as modern naval units - from the perspective of a projectile travelling at M7 they are as immobile as a land fort. This was all despite the fact that it was barely manned by a ragtag demoralised crew on the verge of deserting.Īfter that Germans indeed won the naval scarp with the fraction of the Russian fleet facing them. The fleet _FAILED_ until land units broke through to take the pesky coastal artillery out of the equation. Germans failed to pass Ezel coastal forts at Moonzun until they were taken from behind. There are plenty of nations which could stand up to 1 Nimitz Class carrier, but if that becomes a problem the US just brings 8! This is also why the US Navy is currently all powerful. If the Army builds a fortress 10 times more powerful than a ship, then the Navy just brings 20 ships. But then the Navy has an advantage and it is called concentration of force. The only time this becomes a problem is when the fortress is protected a choke-point like the Dardanelles. If you have a really big fortress the Navy will generally just dodge around it. The problem with land fortifications is that they are generally immobile. Since then we have had the most recent example where the USS Missouri was used to successfully bombard the Kuwaiti coastline in the gulf war. Used for land bombardment because they were considered obsolete for naval combat. The admiral running the show then lost his bottle - despite over 20 battleships being committed to the attack, and the attack already having been won.Īlso don't forget these were pre-Dreadnaught ships.
They had defeated and passed all 4 pairs of forts protecting the Dardanelles, and only lost when a Turkish minelayer laid the last of the Turkish supply of mines behind the Allied ships and 6 battleships were lost in the course of a single day. Hmmm, the interesting thing about the Gallipoli assault was that the British and French Navies had already won.