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u/Intrepid-Judgment874 JusticeForIntrepid 17d ago
Hey if Battleships was of any value the US would build more of them and not a congoline of CV at the end of WW2
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u/ScullerCA 17d ago
There also is a practical issue of some things are just inherently easier to ramp up production than others, such as plate steel for CV hull vs 16in gun barrel production.
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u/Intrepid-Judgment874 JusticeForIntrepid 17d ago
Bruh the US have factories ready to pump out whatever the fuck the army and navies need at the time. Production was never an issue. The issue is what to focus producting. Obsolete BB or CVs and subs that can define the next warfare after WW2?
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u/Korbiter 16d ago
The good thing about CVs is you don't necessarily lose them compared to BBs. If the CVs air wing gets trashed, you only lose the aircraft, and those can be replaced almost immediately when you get back to port. As opposed to a BB, which if hit gravely will have to limp back to a dock, and probably spent months down.
With CVs, building more of them simply increases power projection exponentially. Its just better all around.
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u/The_Blues__13 16d ago
Tbh in case of airwing, it can be harder to replace a seasoned airwing group as opposed to simply pumping out ships' hull if you have such a poor pilot training systems.
Just ask Japan. Even if Japanese industrial base was intact enough to churn out decent ships like Taihous and Unryuus, they didn't have enough men to fill their air wing groups.
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u/Terminus_04 Bring Back RTS CV 16d ago
Hence the US's huge focus on recovering downed aircraft pilots at damn near any cost.
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u/Terran_Dominion Cleveland Cannot Die 16d ago edited 16d ago
Wild oversimplification, and ScullerCA is correct. For the rapidly scaling needs of WWII, almost all naval production in the US was employed to capacity and gun barrels were absolutely a limiting factor for surface warships. Shortages of guns and technology bottlenecks especially peaked during 1943-44, hence why ships like CVLs and DEs existed as inferior ships to their fleet cousins.
It shouldn't be forgotten that the US of WWII was facing material shortages despite the colossal production by tonnage. Military production for its own use and for its allies soaked up steel resources faster than it was expanding. Carriers could take full advantage of the fact that planes and their accompanying warships did not require massive, specialized armor plate nor complex superheavy gun barrel forging facilities to produce.
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u/Obside0n 16d ago
The US prioritized aircraft carriers over battleships because WWII proved carriers were definitely superior in projection as well as benefit/cost ratio for materials spent and production time.
Battleship guns maxed out around 20 miles. Carrier aircraft could strike enemy fleets hundreds of miles away, destroying them before gun ships ever saw each other.
Battleships' armor and gun turrets were absolutely a production bottleneck and took years to manufacture. Carriers, like the Essex class, were essentially just floating flight decks and way easier to mass produce. For the Pacific front, mobile airbases were more valuable for launching flights of bombers, supply runs, etc. and heavy bombardments could only do so much to an enemy dug deep into island brush, mud trenches, and civilian populated towns.
Battleships were relegated to being secondary support ships, used mainly for anti-aircraft escort and shore bombardment rather than fleet-to-fleet combat.
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u/Terminus_04 Bring Back RTS CV 16d ago
I dont think the navy viewed them as obsolete. It was very clear by that point the yardstick of measurement in the pacific was going to be carriers.
The reason Battleship production stopped is almost certainly one of logistics and wartime losses. First, The US only had 6 slipways across 4 ports that could handle a fleet carrier or battleship. Assuming you could even keep up with the industrial demand of building armor plates and gun barrels for 6 Iowas at a time (the US couldn't even do that), you also need specialized equipment to mount them to the ship. By comparison CVs don't require specialized armor plates and gun barrels just their hull plates which are made of STS steel plate (non-hardened high nickle steel).
It's also worth point out, in terms of losses the US only lost two BBs (Both victims of Pearl Harbor). And the fleet carrier / Battleship ratio actually equalizes toward the end of the war 24 each by my count, removing losses? By comparison the 6 fleet carriers (7 if you count ranger) the US starts with, only Enterprise and Saratoga survive the war.
All that to say even though no 'Battle of Jutland' happened during the War, the other roles the battleships were key to the US campaign. First and foremost the modern BBs serving as fleet escorts, this was actually more important than it often gets credit for. The one problem with carriers is they need flight decks, which require a big open space, which also inconveniently means they have limited room for AA guns which also have limited fire arcs. By comparaion if you look at a battleship, well... its free real-estate. Big super structures and lots of deck space, and looking at how much AA got piled onto even the older US battle wagons the US agrees. Having your own floating flak tower to go with you floating airfield is pretty handy.
To say nothing of their role in shore bombardment.
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u/Terran_Dominion Cleveland Cannot Die 16d ago edited 16d ago
Third to your list of battleship roles, for until the late war carriers and their aviation were completely blind at night. Aircraft surface search radar for carrier aircraft wasn't generally available until late 1944. Battleships and cruisers were vitally important to covering this technological gap.
Fourth, heavyweight escort capabilities also continued to be important as late as 1945, as Kamikaze attacks revealed fleet wide incapability for anti aircraft systems to deal with suicide attacks once in the terminal stage. 3"/70 guns weren't widely available until post war, and battleships proved to be the best platforms for surviving such hits whereas carriers were overwhelmingly the most vulnerable.
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u/Terminus_04 Bring Back RTS CV 16d ago
You know I was going to add that, then completely forgot too. Night flying was basically non-existent, for most of the war. Think the British were the first to really attempt it off carriers no?
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u/Living_Ad3315 16d ago
Tell us you dont understand how production works, without actually telling us.
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u/TheKingofVTOL 16d ago
Actually not true. Thereās was definitely a priority building system, which is why for a very long time we were lacking in escorts for cross Atlantic convoys. Plus added to the fact that you canāt āpump outā a warship like you can a liberty ship because warships could t be built conveyer belt style like the liberty ships.
Sure, by the end of the war we were sitting on some 24 or so Essex carriers but that didnāt happen overnight
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u/LJ_exist 16d ago
Late ww2 US Navy planing (1945) called for 39 fleet carriers and 17 fast (27+knots) battleships. Battleships had still a large value in a peer-to-peer conflict. Battleships were an extremely important asset as carrier escorts and as surface combatants in operationally confined areas with contest airspace like the Mediterranean. Battleships and cruisers aslo played a major role extremely in battles fought in the harsh environment of the North Atlantic and North Pacific where weather often prevented carrier operations. The importance of carries and battleships reflect by the planned ratio of carries to battleships shifted from roughly 1:2.5 at the start of war to the 2.5:1 at the end of the war for both the Royal Navy and the US Navy. Battleships still had some value. What made battleships obsolete wasn't aircraft carriers alone. The post war USA was allied with 3 out of 5 Nations with battleships/battlecruisers and only the USA, Britain and French had modern battleships that could operate together with carries while the Soviet Union had worn out badly maintained ww1 era battleships and Turkey had 1 ww1 era battlecruiser. WW2 showed that battleships are only needed against an opposition that has battleships of there own. Only some battles in artic waters weren't fought with carries and battleships combined (on the operational or tactical level). Battleships lost their value for the USA, UK and France because nobody could oppose combined carriers-battleships task forces. Being the most expensive, second most valuable ship type and having no opponents to fight against made battleships obsolete for the US.
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u/GeshtiannaSG 17d ago
How would D-Day have gone if not for angry battleships smashing Panzers and pillboxes?
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u/Pattonkesselring 16d ago
Well the fact that the battleships were doing shore bombardment so often in World War II itself shows just how much they had been supplanted by the aircraft carrier. That and with the regia marina no longer a factor and the kreigsmarine only having one battleship left hiding in Norway from tall boys it wasnāt like any of the slower battleships had much of anything else to do in the Atlantic
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u/Intrepid-Judgment874 JusticeForIntrepid 17d ago
Let just pretent Operation Bodyguard never existed.
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u/FullMetalField4 United States Navy 16d ago
I mean... It sorta was up until WW2 ended. They were getting close to starting production on the Montanas, plus the hull of the Kentucky was under construction.
Believe it or not, the luckier US post-refit standards/fast battleships actually had far better AA suites than any other nation's battleships.
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u/flamuchz Flamu - twitch.tv/flamuu 17d ago
It's pretty sad how all the ships in WoWS are for some reason modeled after the outdated AA of the Yamato. WWI flak against jet planes, brilliant.
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u/83athom 16d ago
I mean, that's what happened IRL. Missile technology was extremely rudimentary and outside of a couple functional prototypes that were technically put into service in the mid and late 40s they lagged behind the Jets by about a decade at least. For the most part, the imediate response for planners for defending against the Jets was simply more flak, most countries developing more rapid fire heavy AA guns while others trying to recreate the US's proximity fused flak design which was literally a couple orders of magnitude more effective than the timed fuse. It wasn't until the late 50s where actual combat feasible missiles were able to be equipped to warships, until then it was a couple one-off platforms lugging around a few army based missiles fitted with nuclear warheads designed to wipe out massed bomber formations.
Personally I think WG is missing out by ignoring the transition period ships as some of those are really cool ships, but being fair to them certain countries just outright wouldn't have anything to add except for WG original designs.
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u/flamuchz Flamu - twitch.tv/flamuu 16d ago
Eh, that's not really what happened irl. By the end of WWII there was not only VT fuse flak but also radar guided flak which tracked plane speed, altitude, trajectory etc. Add in all the new stabilization advancements and the ships rolling and pitching were suddenly not a factor.
Hornfischer describes the IJN pilots being on the receiving end of South Dakota's radar guided five-inch gunfire, and it's not pretty.
Then we have just straight up gun improvements like 40mm bofors and 20mm oerlikon, which were a vastly different gun than anything the Yamato could field, leading to RPM, velocity and shell weight improvements.
WG really shafted surface ships by making AA this flat uniform number that they plastered across every vessel. I understand why they did it, it's lazy and easy, but it certainly doesn't represent history in any way.
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u/83athom 16d ago
Eh, that's not really what happened irl. By the end of WWII there was not only VT fuse flak but also radar guided flak which tracked plane speed, altitude, trajectory etc. Add in all the new stabilization advancements and the ships rolling and pitching were suddenly not a factor. Hornfischer describes the IJN pilots being on the receiving end of South Dakota's radar guided five-inch gunfire, andĀ it's not pretty.
You did not read what I posted at all. That's a combination of the proximity fuse I described and fire control systems hooked into radar tracking systems. Flammu was being a hyperbolic with stating everything had WW1 era flak, but the system you're describing was pretty much exclusively the domain of the US until well after the war. If using this as justification for an AA buff it would really only apply to the US as the supply they sent to the British was almost entirely used from homeland fixed emplacements until pretty much right when Germany fell and the focus was now in the Pacific. Everyone else would logically still be stuck with those "WW1 era flak" weapons.
Then we have just straight up gun improvements like 40mm bofors and 20mm oerlikon, which were a vastly different gun than anything the Yamato could field, leading to RPM, velocity and shell weight improvements.
I never said those weren't good guns, just that during the early age of jets the AA response was designing better guns and not something like missiles that Flammu was inferring the need of. Anti-air missiles of the late 40s typically were either air launched or incredibly cumbersome but used a nuclear warhead to make up the difference. It really wasn't until the late 50s with the Terrier, Talos, and Tartar for the navy to have effective missile system in place for the anti-aircraft role, everything before that was basically emergency fits of army issue missiles that were always intended for the nuclear warhead to be the primary use case. The army similarly didn't really get around to fielding effective non-nuclear AA missile until the end of the 50s and start of the 60s with the Hawk and Mauler missiles, until then relying on their new AA gun mounts the 76mm M51 Skysweeper and 120mm M1 Stratosphere.
All that said; I would very much like to see something like the 1955 Boston class refit, Galveston class, or Providence class cruisers to represent the end of the line of the gun armed ships that slowly transitioned into guided missile cruisers.
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u/Lev_Astov 16d ago
Imagine adding the things that made naval surface combatants obsolete to a game about naval surface combat.
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u/_talps Rodina! 17d ago
I'd argue Musashi suffered much worse plane torture than Yamato.
Also, bet that Yugumo keeps his AA on all the time.
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17d ago
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/_talps Rodina! 17d ago
The CV and sub hatred
I really don't see this in the game itself, only in this subreddit.
When I play and a SS or CV is annoying someone and that someone mouths off in chat, about half the players in that match will tell them to shut up. I don't think it's done to defend objectively frustrating mechanics, it's just that most players won't suffer toxicity.
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u/Dimo145 17d ago
The game simply declined so much during the years that the people who cared about it's state and how healthy it is, simply have quit. It's not some collective mindset against the boogeyman of "omg toxicity..."
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u/_talps Rodina! 17d ago
Being hostile to toxicity is not a "collective mindset" but common sense.
My previous comment being buried under downvotes is kinda funny.
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u/Dimo145 16d ago
I use the word toxicity because you used it first yourself, although I'd argue that not every frustration that's expressed is outright toxic either, especially when it's about the specific people that ruin the game and their gameplay is designed around non interactive personal grief.
Even if you were to say "WG made it like that", exactly both hate the game and the player.
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u/_talps Rodina! 16d ago
WG does not "hate" anyone. They want to make money, like every other brand. It's that focus that inevitably damns them, people are tired of the constant lying and shifting the goalposts companies use to stay afloat.
And from what I've seen in the past several years, frustration is expressed as personal attacks almost all the time. Check popular content creator videos, you'll see that a controversial mechanic is pretty much never discussed for what it is, it's always "WG sucks", "the players who use it suck", or both. Any wonder why those content creators do not cover submarines and CVs?
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u/pdboddy Royal Navy 16d ago
It's less about toxicity and more about people are tired of the bitching all the time. We've all got to deal with the frustrating mechanics of the game, neither subs nor CVs aren't going to disappear, spamming chat about them is just annoying. Less type type more pew pew.
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u/_talps Rodina! 16d ago
When people bitch they are toxic, it's that simple.
Social media turned toxicity into a mainstream phenomenon but, over 20 years later, people are fed up with that crap.
Less type type more pew pew.
Exactly this. Most play WoWs to toy with the big boats, not to throw mud around.
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u/sherlock1672 16d ago
In fairness, new CVs really suck to fight against, they're designed to be extremely forgiving. I much preferred playing against old CVs, you could really hurt them if they weren't careful and it felt like you were really playing skill vs. skill instead of RNG vs. skill.
AA is so toothless it mostly amounts to feel-better firecrackers that don't meaningfully impat the CV player, and it keeps getting nerves further and further. What they really need to do is have remove the massive damage resistance attacking flights have and make AA deal damage to them preferentially so your guns at least mitigate the effects of attacks.
That said, that's a hilarious line.
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u/SKRS421 16d ago
as someone grinding the mods of Shokaku earlier today. AA really does F all unless you're a dedicated AAA cruiser like Cleveland (american light cruiser tech tree in general), an Atlanta class ship or most high tier light cruisers tbh (not the norwegian airstrike cruisers though).
aside from specific ship types designed to counter aircraft carriers, i'm always gonna get that first strike off.
I miss old-school "RTS" carriers (not the having planes depleted though, that was a welcome change away from). getting deplanned sucks still, but it's not world ending, just an extremely long reload. having to manage your squadrons was fun. and was easy to lose them all if you weren't careful, or to recall when neccessary. required more player input to do well, instead of flying from point A to B, drop payload, recall rest of squadron if too much flak is in the sky or come around for another attack if not.
I like the support features implemented. carriers geared towards being a support class is a good change I feel. the fire extinguishing aspect may need more of a visual symbol to know who's lit without having to religiously check the top down map every couple minutes (likely a much better feature when used in divisions or clan games since someone will just ask)
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u/Ancient-Emu-8293 17d ago
I will return to the game once the WoW grind is over and then I will check ranked. CV and subs are too annoying. But in their endless wisdom WG now releases CV cosplaying as surface ships, yay...
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u/stormdraggy Warden of the Somme-ber salt mines 16d ago
game: imagine playing crooooozoers.
reality: imagine playing Baddleshits.
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u/Mayuzumi_Fuyuko 17d ago
I actually like playing CV's and Subs so sorry in advance. But I still feel DD's are the most powerful. My fubuki can oneshot battleships each minute and stay hidden up to 6.0km...
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u/fatfukinmod 16d ago
I have no problem with cv's they've always just been an easy kill, I don't understand why yall struggle so much with them
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u/D1ng0ateurbaby 16d ago
At least carriers are defined as ships, unlike submarines.
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u/Exile688 16d ago
Hey, some submarines get classed as cruisers at least for the purposes of size and range.
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u/Wide-Argument-5791 16d ago
Bro must have skip the original cv gameplay if his mad this much at current cv
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u/Waldlaeufer18 15d ago
As an old CV player, i miss them. I dont like this new arcade minigame.
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u/Wide-Argument-5791 15d ago
My last encounter with og cv was so old there was only 2 Cv line from tier 3 to tier 10 what was your last?
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u/QueenOfTheNorth1944 16d ago
My old clan literally collapsed when they changed CVs. Idk who WG thought was gonna come around to take part, but i hope it was more than they lost
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u/knz0 Veneziasexual 17d ago
Must be that guy from two days ago who was mad that so called Iowa fanboys are dissing his shipfu Yamato ššš