Castenea wrote:Lord Skimper wrote:Pocket battleships with 5" smoothbore guns would be great. Shells, Armour piercing sabots and songster type missiles. Small fast powerful.
NO. Modern armored cruiser optimized with for shore support. Two or four triple turrets with the 155mm Smooth-bore from the M1 Abrams. Enough armor to protect the vitals and crew battle stations from counter battery fire up to MLRS batteries. 30+ Knot top speed, room for good AAA suite and Land attack cruise missiles.
A battleship does not give enough improvement until you can equip it with energy hogs like Electromagnetic rail guns, 6-10 PDLCs instead of CIWS and then the fact it has room for a very large sensor suite is simply gravy. The big downside to the battle wagons was the size of the crews and how much it cost to pay and feed them. Until there is a clear advantage to having a bigger ship as opposed to similar numbers of crew on smaller ships they will not be built.
Abrams has a 120mm or earlier version the 105mm gun.
155mm is an Artillery gun.
The reason you use the Russian 125mm tank gun is that it is an established gun with autoloading, It fires HE, AT shaped charge, Sabot and Songster Missiles through the tube with the autoloader. With auto targeting and coaxial gun for defensive fire or 7.62mm suppression fire. Mounting the T90 turrets is cheap easy stabilised and powerful. Explosive reactive and millimetre radar active armour. Indirect you get a 16 km range. Direct fire 4 km range, missile is made for 8 to 12 km range and anti helicopter use. Add in S400 or similar weapons and you get a complete system. Anti Air, Anti Missile, Anti Armour, Bombardment, Anti Helicopter, Could even make a Songster type torpedo.