US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5395

On December 26 2025 18:30 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:
So the US is building 25 battleships and China is doing the exact opposite and building container based weapon modules with different types of missiles as well as container based support modules like radars and phalanx systems.

Essentially turning their massive fleet of container ships into prospective missile cruisers.

There are problems with arming civilian ships but it's mainly against smaller threats because they aren't built for taking damage. But against battleships and aircraft carriers it will be fine.

On December 26 2025 19:34 oBlade wrote:

They're guided missile battleships. They're not WW2 gun broadside ships.

They will hopefully do better than a bunch of retrofitted container ships, but nobody can know that while it's all just wargames. Like nobody thought you could drive a truck with drones into Russia and just launch them. The US could increase shipbuilding to try to regain parity with Asia but that would require policies geared towards shipbuilding, and towards steel, especially steel production which is independent of your enemies for national security reasons, and most people don't have the stomach to go in depth on those.

The US has the capability, and technological advantage, but not sustained production of tonnage. That's why the massive peacetime fleet is necessary and why guided missile/multirole capital ships is a good slight hedge when the fleet now is now based around 2 things - supercarriers, and subs, and the latter mainly comes into play only once thermonuclear war has already begun. You could produce a lot of small ships instead of fewer bigger ships, but in no sense do container ships get an edge.

Is your point a container ship is so trivial as to be invulnerable to massive warships, or is your point since they're going to get blown up in 1 hit anyway it's immaterial?

On December 26 2025 19:24 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:


"The US isn't doing" has been said for years about Trump.
Usually it turns out that the US will indeed try whatever he wants.

On December 27 2025 02:18 Billyboy wrote:
The real question is when they are not build but billions are spent and Trump and people in his orbit make shit tons. Will oBlade still be thinking it is a great idea? My guess is yes. Because he still has not realized that the wall was a massive grift just like basically everything Trump does.

On December 26 2025 19:34 oBlade wrote:

They're guided missile battleships. They're not WW2 gun broadside ships.

On December 28 2025 02:01 hitthat wrote:


I still don't see how those can be fitted into current US doctrine that treats carrier battlegroup as a core of their naval power. What does dispersed flotilla of smaller ships with minimal crews like friggates or destroyers (not that destroyers are even small) do worse than big, heavly armored vessels, especially after we know that giving armour penetrating capabilities is just a metter of simple modifications for already existing surface-surface missiles? I tried to find some answers but I couldn't. Aren't missile cruisers enough of capital ships? Is the armoured hulls that of adventage on curent battlefield?

On December 28 2025 02:00 oBlade wrote:

The DoD spends a trillion dollars a year whether they make a new ship or not.

Every new government project costs more than it's supposed to. That's a separate issue. NASA can get away with changing their moon program every 4-8 years for 4 decades until nothing happens because the moon is a luxury, but the military actually needs tangible stuff eventually. The F-35, overbudget, is here. The Zumwalt destroyer class, while overbudget and ultimately not adopted, were built and are afloat as demonstrators/prototypes if nothing else.

What do you think the navy needs?

On December 28 2025 06:16 hitthat wrote:
Naming ships isn't an issue. He could call it USS Shit-That-Swims-And-Shoot-Lazers and except of morale hit for entire Navy it wouldn't mean shit as long as it does work. I could bare my navy calling new polish frigates ORP Pink Pinguin With Plastique Nipples only if I knew those will do the job.

On December 24 2025 04:09 LightSpectra wrote:


I genuinely believe that the dam will break the moment a prominent FOX News host or Republican Congressman (besides Massie or MTG) finally vocally admits that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that Trump is a child molester.

Reminder, FBI agents got paid millions in overtime to redact Trump's name from the files. The fact that these are slipping through the cracks must've meant he was in almost every file and was essentially the ringleader alongside Epstein and Maxwell.

On December 28 2025 02:01 hitthat wrote:


I still don't see how those can be fitted into current US doctrine that treats carrier battlegroup as a core of their naval power. What does dispersed flotilla of smaller ships with minimal crews like friggates or destroyers (not that destroyers are even small) do worse than big, heavly armored vessels, especially after we know that giving armour penetrating capabilities is just a metter of simple modifications for already existing surface-surface missiles? I tried to find some answers but I couldn't. Aren't missile cruisers enough of capital ships? Is the armoured hulls that of adventage on curent battlefield?

On December 28 2025 12:07 oBlade wrote:

Thick steel hulls I've seen conflicting opinions on, whether it does anything for direct hits now. There might be benefits in the case of sending a ship somewhere like Iran or South America. But we don't know that armor will make it in the final design.

Ticonderogas are on their way out and there aren't new cruisers on the way or planned.

This leaves the Arleigh Burke as the US jack-of-all-trades. The thing is missiles are getting more numerous and precise. The cat-and-mouse game. Even if you disperse all your power equally to identical destroyers, you can't disperse the carrier. That ship has sailed. It's like making a composition of all hydras. Okay, hydras are great. You are vulnerable to storm. People rightly don't look at carriers as a massive vulnerable eggbasket that is a doctrine mistake. Instead, they look at all the countries that don't have them and can't make them and note wow, they lack the force projection that nuclear supercarriers provide.

Whether the opponent is North Korea or China or Russia one of the opportunities is one big swarm timing to overload US defense to have a chance at getting through. But that's true whether or not capital ships exist. If you have a fleet of only destroyers, overloading their defense with missiles and torpedoes is equally the best shot at blowing them up as if there were a carrier or battleship primary target in the mix.

A battleship size hull gives you a couple things. One is remove the limiting factor of electricity. Because you can go nuclear comfortably with the space. You need a lot of electricity to run the biggest and best radars, EWAR, and handle peak loads of launching/tracking. You need it for potential future railguns/directed energy weapons and upgrades. Nuclear gives you unlimited endurance and global projection even if the group's oilers got blown up. The large hull also gives you high physical capacity for peak firing (More missiles, some bigger missiles, and faster rate of missiles exiting the ship). But again this is slightly laughably assuming the US is only in a defensive posture, which sounds kind of like "don't make defilers because they could be irradiated." The power of missiles is defensive and offensive.

I think you and a lot of other people are forgetting the 20 story elephant that is SpaceX and Starship. That thing alone will have the capability to push space lasers and other ballistics into LEO and that's all she wrote. We're not building battleships or anything else, we're building space armadas at this point.

On December 28 2025 17:20 Gorsameth wrote:
Must be frustrating for Oblade, only coming up with such weak arguments to defend Trumps latest stupidity.

On December 28 2025 17:20 Gorsameth wrote:
Carriers have this thing called a runway that mandates a minimum length, same way battleships had to be big to carry their enormous caliber guns.
Missiles dont have that same limitation.

On December 28 2025 17:20 Gorsameth wrote:
And the nuclear argument is bullshit when nuclear subs are as big as destroyers.

On December 28 2025 18:23 oBlade wrote:

I'm good.


Aircraft carriers have to be large not only to support a flight deck, they also have to be large in order to carry the airplanes that are to launch from their catapults. What's your personal spatial relations take on how missiles are stored and launched? I'll give you a hint, it's not like the map turret defense where you can stack 100 missile turrets on top of each other under the fog of war and cram unlimited firepower in just a few hexes. Certainly few missiles require less space than more missiles, and more varied missiles, and guns and other modern systems - which require more space.


Nuclear subs are as big as destroyers. Hold that thought.

Your phone and Tesla both run on "lithium batteries." They're not the same size or output.

Similarly, subs do not have the same reactors as carriers, despite that both are nuclear. You have been misinformed. Carrier reactors do much more.

Subs have less electrical demands than surface ships. They do not have significant radars, no EW, no energy weapons. You can say, but between its propulsion and everything else, a destroyer still only uses X electricity! Yes. Because it's constrained at using X electricity unless you find a way to fit more electricity in it. And if there's no way to do that, but you have things that use electricity that you want to put in a ship, you would have to make a different ship capable of that.

This is why there's no nuclear Zumwalt clearly planned, the hull doesn't support a reactor that would justify switching to nuclear in terms of providing blow-you-out-of-the-water electrical output. The only thing you get at that size from nuclear is unlimited endurance. Which, there used to be nuclear cruisers, and despite that they were the only surface nuclear escorts for carriers that had equally unlimited endurance, they were phased out. Because at that time the second reason - very power-heavy systems - that didn't exist decades ago. But the most advanced tech nowadays does use that much power, and more. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the strategic threat to carriers, and the geopolitical backdrop, didn't really necessitate needing to have specifically nuclear cruisers anymore. But the strategic threats and geopolitical backdrop have changed and certainly China today is not China 30 years ago.