Han (The Preble) shot first.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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Who would win?
New Navy with line of sight laser weapon (3 mile range to horizon), or this smokey boy throwing 2,000 lbs of steel over the horizon.
I don't know. Can the laser shoot artillery shells out of the air?
Nope. It can only melt them.
That does not make any sense at all. If you can melt through an artillery shell's wall, you trigger the explosives inside it. The shells end up exploding miles away from your ship's hull. Maybe you'll end up with some inert metal fragments falling down on your ship's deck, but it's not going to do any damage except maybe minor injuries to unarmored personnel standing on the deck.
It can't melt through such a large mass of steel in the short time it has before it hits. The lasers are meant for missiles which have very thin metal walls. Also, the AP rounds aren't explosive. They're a solid mass of steel.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2015/february/armaments-innovations-navys-supershells
Huh. Learn something new every day.
Not if they are cannon balls. Checkmate lasers.
I mean...I don't think any naval ship manufactured after 1870 has much to fear from cannon balls.
That picture is the closest representation of what hellfire must be without entering nuclear territory. For sheer display of power, that is that, in my opinion.
They are sending so much hate that the entire ship was pushed sideways, look at the wake off the bow.
There's very minimal lateral movement. Almost all of the recoil goes downward. It would be very bad if the recoil moved the ship laterally, because then you lose your fire control solution.
Quick, someone remind me which ship it was that was starting to sink so they just shoveled water to one side do they could extend the range of their weapons and effectively become an extra artillery team during WWII (was that the siege of Normandy?)
USS Texas, commanded by Captain Baker.
Man the US was so much cooler when it stood for something
You mean when it was great?
I wouldn't call it great, but at least they put up a facade. And the actual action, as cool as it was, shouldn't have ever needed to happen and was therefore pretty not great.
Don't pin your bullshit on me :)
What do you think the US should stand for?
I wish the US stood for something positive. Whether that's freedom (and actual freedom, not the shit we've been peddling for the last 200 years), happiness, well-being I don't care.
But we haven't stood for anything, or even bothered to put on the facade that we stood for anything, at least for the last 10 years or so. At least, that's what I've felt. At some point we just said "fuck it you're right. We're here to make money, we were only pretending to care before lol"
That’s not how I see it. I used to see it that way, but as I switched sides that coincided with me daring to hope again, and seeing the good in people.
I’m sorry all you see when you look at your country is shit. That’s a terrible place to be. I hope you can at least intellectually understand, even if you don’t feel it in your gut, that such a worldview is highly dependent on the filters in your own perception.
I think you probably know that, but my hunch is you only think of that self-deception as operating toward the positive: that goodness can be an illusion but badness must be reality because why would a person project badness onto the world.
I will propose that a person can be motivated to hallucinate badness, because a world with some good in it can hurt a lot more than a world with no good in it, because hope is painful.
It’s like trying to light a fire when you’re freezing in the middle of the woods. Moving your frozen fingers around, trying to light a match, uncurling your body to stack up the wood, it all hurts far more than just curling up in a ball and going to sleep.
Obviously there’s always going to be evil in everything, including you and me and including the entire country. But the existence of evil doesn’t make the world dark; it makes it a place of contrast.
Of the things you mentioned — freedom, happiness, well-being — which would you say is the highest one? If you had to pick one to put at the top of your own hierarchy, and have the country stand for it above all else, which of those three would be the highest ideal?
You're putting some words into my mouth. I have a lot more hope than you think, and that's evident if you poke around my profile and see some of the politics that I talk about. My non-profit idea comes to mind first. I have to have hope in people for ideas like that to ever work, because it relies very heavily on communal thinking.
As to your question, it's a balance. It's not a matter of "this is more important than that" it's a matter of "these things affect each other and we have to prioritize them correctly at the appropriate times in order to handle the current situation"
The fight against the wrong type of racism?
I mean we can be cynical about what it was, but it's plain to see that people actually cared and worked together when we had the facade of caring about freedom. As we become more divided and cynical, as we push each other away and become more aware of the injustices around us without taking the steps to affect them, we clearly become less effective all the way down to the individual level
The country back then was divide by law. Fascism was very, very, popular. There was routine civil/labor rights violence. Political assassination, and attempts, were more common.
How many assassination attempts did presidential candidates have back then?
Roosevelt, Hoover, and Truman all had assassination attempts, however I was not talking just about presidential ones. There were a lot of more local level ones.
People also fought for us to be where we are now. They didn't roll over and die like so many want to do now
There were plenty of those people too. It was damn near impossible to convince the majority of people to join the war effort, hell, they may never actually have. The public, at large, was fine with doing business with the axis, and what came to be our allies, and didn't think we should bother getting involved, it wasn't our problem. It took the government going against these wishes, to engineer a situation in which it became our problem, before there was enough support to do something.
You mean the people in government at the time stood up and fought against oppression? Because they were inspired by the facade of standing for freedom?
People centric language can make history look more inspiring instead of damning some times
That's only minimaly due to sideways movement. Much more important is that the shockwaves are pushing water down creating a terracing effect.
"Burn to oblivion. I have places to be."
Probably the ship, if it was sentient.
Fun fact: The US ha a Hellfire missile that doesn't even explode. It's meant to hit one person and kill them while limiting casualties in the proximity.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/agm-114r9x.htm
Ah yes, the knife gun.
Knife MISSILE, CIVVIE
So it's essentially a rocket propelled ~~rock~~ knife block?
It is like a rocket propelled slap chop to one person that shouldn't exist meaningfully to the horror of the person sitting next to them.
If you don't need accuracy, the Age of Sail beats this easily. This boy has 12 cannons, the Santísima Trinidad had 140.
A broadside must have been spectacular.
All of Trinidad's throw weight is less than a single 16".
Trinidad Total throw. 1510lbs.
Missouri single barrel single shot weight. HE 1900lbs AP 2700lbs.
Total throw weight. HE 17,100lbs AP 24,300lbs and that's ignoring all secondaries and AA and later added missiles. Missouri could throw the total weight all of Trinidads cannons themselves in a single broadside. Oh and that's throwing it 24mi....
I get it, though your calculations are a bit off, the Trinidad's total throw comes off as a bit more, around 1150 kg, not 684 kg as you suggested.
That said, I was going by spectacular explosions, or amount of boom. If it's about how much shit you can throw at an enemy, the recently sunk Moskva could launch 76000 kg of explosives and steel at you in a single volley (if operated by someone not as completely inept as the Russian Navy). In fact, rocket artillery is so OP from this perspective that a single old Katyusha could throw more than 500 kg at you, so the Missouri is worth around 1.2 shitty technical trucks with MLRS batteries strapped to them per cannon.
All of the Trinidad's iron cannon balls would bounce off the 12" steel armor of the Iowa battleship.
Yeah and the Iowa would be powerless against a sustained modern ASM volley. But still, it would look cool.
The laser is for drones or missiles. Missiles are used for ships, which outrange battleships by a large margin, hence why they've been phased out of service. One jet can sink a ship hundreds of miles from its carrier.
It has been suggested before that we might one day see a return of the battleships. The one technology that might allow it is truly effective rail gun technology. I remember seeing a story years ago speculating that such a ship parked of the coast of North Korea might be able to lodge shells anywhere onto the Korean Peninsula from well offshore.
Missiles are always likely to have their advantages, including range and maneuverability. But the potential advantage of railguns is a very cheap cost per shot. And instead of a ship's hold full of explosive-stuffed missiles, your ship has a reactor, a bank of capacitors, and a whole bunch of shells that are little more than big slugs of inert metal.
This article for example suggests a potential railgun range of 200 km.
Us truly mastering railguns is one of the few scenarios that we might actually see a return of the old battleships. Except instead of artillery shells, they'll be lobbing railgun slugs. And instead of being protected by foot-thick steel armor, they'll be protected by a porcupine lattice of laser defense systems.
How would a battleship defend itself against railguns?
Or would this be a "whoever shoots first wins" scenario?
Oblique angles on all possible bulkheads, and probably the biggest fuck-you electromagnet the military can strap onto a ship.
The way I understand it, a railgun slug by definition of the way a railgun works is required to be made of ferrous metal. We can use that to defend against it. A quarter second blip of extreme magnetism may be able to repel the bullet (or, alternatively, attract it off course from the main body of the ship). You'll EMP the shit out of anything on board, but eh, you can harden against that if you know it's coming.
Only other solution I can think of off hand is slagging the incoming round with laser fire but I have trouble believing you'd be able to detect, target, and vaporize an incoming railgun round in the amount of time you have between detection and impact. Those suckers move fast. Average result feels like it would be, congrats, you weren't hit by a railgun round, but you have been hit by ten pounds of liquid metal moving at nearly relativistic speeds. Potato potato.
Though, with the magnetic defense, the logical next step here is to develop a sort of ferrous sabot round that can accelerate the (non ferrous) payload and then release it to then completely not give any shits about further magnets. You pull that off and your opponent will have to rely on a laser intercept system or similar, and then - yeah, basically, whoever shoots first wins.
There's a lot to be said for good armor with good oblique angles though. Deflecting force is always going to be easier than absorbing it. If you can arrange to never give your enemy a good shot at a good flat plane, they'll have a lot harder time penetrating your armor no matter how fast their shots are going. This won't save you all the time but it'll do a lot more than you'd probably expect.
I'm not sure. Assumedly, the same way it would protect itself against ballistic missiles.
Doing an aikido roll at the last moment?
*If funded by the USA.
The US took out a third of Iran's navy during Operation Praying Mantis and we tried not to while giving them ample opportunity to not get fucking wrecked with minimal effort.
We won't fund healthcare, but our unhealthcare is second to nobody because we spend 9x more than the 2nd place loser, Russia. We account for 40% of total world military spending. If you think we can't kill you, it is only because we don't want to prove how wrong you are. If you want to die, we can put a warhead on your forehead without a rounding error of our defense budget.
Unhealthcare... wow.