I've seen the Philadelphia Shipyards which were basically bankrupt and were bought by a Korean company called Hanwha not long ago mentioned several times, but it's a little unclear to me if this is official or just people connecting the dots. That scenario, apparently, is another in the long list of pipe dreams that surround these ships. I'm in no way qualified to comment on industrial ship building capabilities, but from what Ive read that while they do have the space, the list of issues Hanwha would face to even start to build these ships in hiring employees, refurbishing the derilict yards, then dealing with all the legal requirements for building military ships for the Navy would probably take a decade to solve. That's even before starting to actually build the superstructures. China currently builds 54% of all ships globally, while the US builds 0.1% and every existing US military ship order is faced with chronic delays due to production limitations. And it is illegal for obvious reasons to build ships for the USN outside the US. Trump thinks his fascination with branding and marketing makes him a genius. He doesn't care about the actual industry of building ships and none of his sycophants would dare educate him or disabuse him of his ridiculous misapprehensions.
i love the "we can't do things because things are broken" argument. we can, and have, built things. from scratch. it takes a will, and the way will manifest. I can cite an example if you're uncertain.
We can do it, as long as you dont mind it taking 20 years. I will bet you any anount you find reasonable that we dont have 2 completed ships in the stated 2.5 year time scale with all the experimental components described in the rollout anouncement as present and fully functional. Thsts a short enough timescale we should both be alive and I trust you are honorable enough not to welch, unlike a certain someone who will remain unnamed. We could do it it less than 20 years (maybe 8 or.10) if we moon-landinged it, and back-burnered a bunch of other things but we aren't going to. Can and will are not the same. We're too broke already and this isn't going to be that unifying of a vision that congress will get that behind it, and stick their necks out to approve massive funding for a moon-landing program especially as divisive as Trump insists on being and after the mid-terms when everything's going to get much more hostile. He's.basically entering his lame.duck phase already, with Republicans who wouldn't have.crossed him two months ago openly defying him. I'm also reasonably certain they'll be canceled once Trimp is no longer in office, but I could be wrong if there's like 5 Republican Presidents in a row who really need to lean on the memory of Trump to get things done, which I can't rule out.
Bajillions. That's like measuring how many F-35s we could produce based on how many fighter planes we made in WWII. Hint - they could't make 100,000 F-35's no matter how much they wished. The levels of complexity are completley different and there are bottlenecks, like how.many rare earth elements we can get our hands on, that weren't a factor then. Again, I am willing to bet my house that whatever you thing MIGHT or COULD happen, we WON'T have 2 of these ships with all experimental systems fully functional in 2.5 years. That's the bottom line. You can get pretty extreme if you imagine exteme enough scenarios. But we aren't going to, say, triple the national debt, start mining the moon for rare earths, and halt all other naval procurement and redirect all other DARPA research in service of finishing the incomplete technical issues to get these two ships built. If it helps I will agree that one can imagine conditions where we could get it done. I just think those conditions are vanishingly unlikely to occur in the real world at this point in time.
But couldn't they just make a destroyer or whatever the Navy needs and call it a Trump-class battleship?
They could. It would be pretty embarasing for the USN. They probably would get laughed at by other country's navys. It would be like rebadging all the army's humvees with applique "Trump brand Ferarri" badges and bragging at every opportunity that our army is the yugest bigliest army in the world, (everybody's saying it!) because they drive around in Ferarris unlike the poors from every other loser shithole country. I get that most people don't really understand the distinction, but I guarantee every naval professional in the world is accutely aware of the difference between a battleship and a destroyer and would giggle at destroyers called battleships. Like that video of Azeri and Albanian leaders laughing at trump at the UN for ending their "war". Maybe you don't think that would be a big deal, but anything that makes the USN seem frivolous or silly breaks the fear/intimidation factor that navys rely on, like when doing freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. You aren't going to intimidate adversaries with a punchline. But they've said they're going weigh 2x-2.5x as much as current destroyers being produced by the USN so as it stands they aren't exactly going to be exactly rebranded destroyers (30k-40k tons vs 15k tons for Zumwalt destroyers). Iowa battleships, the last real battleships made are listed at 48k tons unloaded, 58k tons fully loaded. If you've ever been to the USS Texas, which was what qualified as a battleship and acted as a 2nd tier battleship in WWII, it came in at about 35k tons fully loaded. I don't think they've actually come up with concrete set of design perameters yet, or any plans at all outside of some Trump branded conceptual artwork, so I guess we'll see. Then they have to get congress to allocate funds, etc. The guesses I've seen for cost are on par with the Gerald Ford, the newest carrier. I think the money would be better spent on another carrier or like 3 to 5 more destroyers. Genuinely, I'm fairly confident they won't ever make it all the way to being built so I'm not really worried. Its not something the Navy even wants or asked for, its a vanity project for Trump. The military has a long, long history of dumping billions into development programs and canceling them when the wind changes and they decide they no longer fit into their doctrine. What Trump is proposing doesn't currently fit into USN doctrine, so we don't have to wait for the winds to change. The railgun that is central to that concept art was already canceled by the Navy once because wear issues required barrels to be replaced after a very limited number of shots and the power requirements to use it.were prohibitive on a ship were prohibitive unless you had something like a nuclear reactor to give you near unlimited power (i saw someone who said aadding nuclear reactors to the design would basically mean you'd have to build them at Newport News, who's booked for decades refurbishing and maintaining the nuclear powered carrier fleet). This proposal is the proverbial tail wagging the dog and I strongly suspect that once Trump is gone, they will be too. I'm guessing that that's where the ridiculous 2.5 year timeframe comes from. They want to somehow finish them before the next President cancels them, but I think that is wildly unrealistic. I've been reading/listening to what a bunch of people with actual Navy/military experience think, and that seems to be a pretty common assumption.
The Texas, like nearly every US warship, played next to no role in WW1. She was arguably the most important battleship in all of WW2. She was the only allied battleship that participated in both the North Africa and Normandy landings in the Atlantic theatre, and at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the Pacific.
She was built to WWI plans with 14" guns which and the smaller displacement. Shore bombardment and convoy duties (as opposed to main fleet patrol combat duties) were for older, less modern battleships. There were 8 newer classes built after the Texas ( about ~20 battleships) with newer better technology. That doesn't include the 4 Iowa class battleships that were under construction at the start of WWII. If the Texas had faced off against the Iowa, it wouldn't have been a fair fight. Her technology and capabilities were 2nd tier by the start of WWII. She did a lot, but she wasn't put into action in the roles they used the front line newest battleships for if the admiralty had had the choice. i believe she didn't sink a single enemy ship during WWII. I cant find a single instance of her engaging enemy surface combatants. Maybe we're talking past each other. I think I'm done with this thread. I'm "talking" too much and I don't like being that guy. Apologies for being so "loud".
As is nothing you wrote being dispositive to anything I said. Mostly what I was trying to do in responding to your response was to see if I could get you to understand the distinction that I was making in the post you responded to. As I said, we're talking past each other. Edit- OK, i finally see the issue. I missed an I In the bit you quoted. It should have read WWII, not WWI. I type all this crap on my phone and I can barely see what I'm writing with by broken down presbyopic eyes. Also, it doesn't have the spell checking or grammar hints you get from a desktop browser. All my posts seem to be filled with typos and errors. I try to correct on the fly, which is why most of my posts have like 30 edits immediately after posting, but I missed that one. I'm sure I've missed more than a few others in my bout of written diarrhea in this thread. Apologies.
