Battleships were largely obsolescent by the beginning of WW2. The new "Trump Class" ships, if actually built will

[haele]

13. Extremely expensive and will take years to design.

Last edited Tue Dec 23, 2025, 01:20 AM - Edit history (1)

Okay, Navy Combat System Chief (ret.) here - not a gunny, but worked with missile, guns, and radar systems, and more importantly, have worked in shipbuilding and modernization for decades.

1. Other Navy ships have large guns, and the hull tonnage to support those guns increases exponentially the larger or more guns you add. And as your guns have to rotate and be able to adjust altitude, again, the larger the gun, the heavier the moving parts and greater the power needed to fire those guns.
Not to mention deck clearance required just to aim and fire those guns.
2. So a ship with guns is going to have to be bigger, and go through rigorous modeling to look at ship handling and operational risks - not only deck safety and damage control issues, but power distribution, hull integrity, and other systems operations during firing, from just maneuvering and firing off one gun to a full flanking battery fire. "Asthetics " be damned, you need gunnery people involved, not some golf hack who builds Minecraft buildings, puts gold leaf on everything, and whose buddies think the Cyber Truck is something "Blade Runner" would drive (I'm sure Harlen Ellison and his character Deckard would have comments on that...)
And definitely not the type of complicated maritime engineering I'd trust any AI currently available to do without serious oversight and slide rule engineering level corrections.
3. Another point - what sorts of guns are they talking about? Conventional Kinetic, "Rail Guns", or Laser Beams?
I'm sorry, a rail gun that is more efficient than missiles or current guns, or high intensity lasers with enough power to take down incoming air targets or damage surface targets will need a nuclear power plant at least as large as the ones on a Carrier. Even if you use a plant the size of the average submarine, you're still looking at something that will need a lot of internal infrastructure to support. And very expensive to build.
Do you really, really want to rush building a nuclear power plant?

Anyway, my final comment here goes back to the first question that should have been asked:

Do we really need a battleship, in the current war arena where drones and missiles are taking out ships pretty easily from further away than a gun or "beam" type weapon would be effective? Would a battleship be useful in future naval combat, where potential targets are mobile and warfare is asymmetric across several different types of battlefields?
A missile or drone strikes me as being the more effective deployable weapon in terms of both tactical and cost. And a "Battleship" supports neither.

Ah well, they'll probably bring back or modify a Littoral Combat Ship, make it "yuge" (and ineffective), and call it a Battleship.

Easy enough to parade around, make a big boom-boom show on a Tiger Cruise, then shuffle off and hide in Pearl Harbor until the namesake life form shuffles off the mortal coil, then scrap.