Wayne.B wrote:
On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:52:31 +0100, Andy Champ
wrote:

Wayne.B wrote:
On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:02:15 +0100, Andy Champ
wrote:

Reagan recommissioned a couple of battleships. While it seemed crazy
they performed very well for shore bombardment duties.
It was crazy. They performed well for a battleship but not compared
to modern precision guided munitions. Accuracy at typical range was
something like plus or minus 400 feet, close enough to scare your
target but not necessarily destroy it.

Odd, I thought I recalled them being used a cruise missile launchers
among other things...


They might have had some cruise missles also but that was secondary to
the big battleship guns. A battleship is a very inefficient platform
for launching missles since the historical advantages were heavily
armored hulls and massive artillery, none of which is required for
missle launching since it can be safely done from hundreds of miles
away. Cruise missles have an accuracy of about 10 feet or better vs
maybe 400 ft for a battleship's guns on a good day.


The New Jersey was used extensively in Nam because of it's pinpoint
accuracy. Once a spotter walks the battleship onto the target, its all over.
The way it worked was a spotter (often a small single engine, unarmed
plane (bird dog)) would tell the battleship the coordinates of the next
target. The BS would fire one round and the spotter would radio back a
spot. It often took only two or three spots and that was all she wrote.
Even our little 5 inchers were deadly accurate but you had to have
either a spotter or the target had to be visible so your rangefinder
could input to the computer.
The shells for 5 inch and up used powder bags separate from the
projectile. The powder bags were weighed and powder temp recorded and
the computer adjusted for these figures. The gyro stabilized everything.
So the spotter says I've got an NVA village and here are the
coordinates. You pop in a round. The spotter says thats good, fire for
effect. So you send in some high explosive set for a 50' air burst, you
send in another with slightly different range and bearing, and you do
this until the village is leveled. Then you start over doing the same
thing only using willie peter (white phosphorus) and you burn up what
you flattened.
Not as accurate as a cruise missle, but then GPS wasn't even a thought
at that time.
Gordon