Does the idea of building military versions of cargo ships make sense?

I don't want to derail the thread, but you are reddit-spacing, faggot.

I know that has nothing to do with what I immediately thought of, but I still had a giggle

Modern day military ships are built of aluminum and instead of having weapons protected within a hull they bolt them on the deck. Also those weapons as only dangerous to civilian shipping, most of it is light subsonic missiles that any CIWS can shoot down all day and torpedoes with a few miles range. USN for example isn't even a threat to a foreign military, it's completely incapable of doing damage to military targets. Essentially what it does is waltz offshore an enemy, and then launch airplanes and cruise missiles to bomb civilian infrastructure, until the enemys own civilians force their government to submit.

A civilian cargo ship is just as good, just close all the hatches, bolt some bottle rockets to the deck, and you have the equivalent of a modern frigate.

No. Eggs in baskets, something something.

I'm hungry

are you retarded? because that's the sort of thing someone who is retarded would say.

when making separate points you're supposed to separate them so they don't look like they're in the same paragraph. this is how the English language has worked for at least two-hundred years.

How do you not understand this?

People are dumb. The "reddit spacing" meme came from the fact that reddit formatting is easier if you multi space your text, rather than single spacing. If you single space it just looks like normal lined text, you have to doublespace to do it.

So reddit text would look like this:
The pleasure of Buzby's company is what I most enjoy.

He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, when she called him a horrible boy.

At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens, across the width of the room.

I counted on his schemes to reveal the way to escape my gloom.

Double spacing in particular, not single spacing, and not paragraphs. But retarded children on chans wanted to look cool by "calling out redditors" so we're stuck with this stupid fucking meme.

Terrible idea that already started deceit through "loaded" political targets. Situations where ships carrying both war gear and civilians gets sunk without escort and the propaganda office publishes that a cruise liner gets attacked for no justified reason.

...

That is what paragraphing is. He is paragraphing. You do realize paragraphing is based on content and not length, right? If the idea only has one line worth of content then you leave it at that. You don't lump separate ideas together just to form a block of text in the name of paragraphing.

Could an enemy pull that same tactic on the US considering how many people were upset that they might have to pay more on their electronics from China?

a) double spacing means a double press of the space-bar, not double press of the enter key
b)This was a single press of the enter key

c) this was a double press of the enter key

d) you used three presses of the enter key, which looks like that.

I personally use double line-breaks to separate different areas of my replies, for example an introduction from the main argument, and single line-breaks to separate new topics inside of each of those.
So for example I could use single line-breaks like this to make a new point in my main argument, and if this text got a little too long or confusing use them again to give the reader room to digest what they have read so far.
By adding a double line-break you are adding an entire free line with no text whatsoever. This is sometimes very good and serves as a visual indicator that the previous part of your text is not only visually separated from the following, but may also be disconnected from a content perspective.

Again, I am not trying to derail the thread at all, but hitting enter three times after every single sentence like did is entirely retarded. Also: the first letter of the first word of every sentence should be capital.

show me where I referred to double-spacing you fucking idiot. i don't know how people do things in whatever bullshit language you grew up with but in english separate thoughts get separate paragraphs. these paragraphs can be single sentences, or multiple sentences, depending on how many words you need to convey point you're making.

we also make spaces so what we're typing doesn't make a wall of text that is tedious to read.

pull your head out of your ass and take a walk outside for some fresh air, cunt.

holy shit the education system failed all of you.

While I have no doubt they've got lots of military vessels that are made from all manner of materials, I'd say it's most likely military warships make use of steel more than aluminum for one big reason:

Steel is easy to weld, and can be used in all of the different flavors from stainless steel to mild steel to tool steel. meanwhile anodized aluminum is hands-down the best and really only choice for boats, due to corrosion resistance, and is a pain in the ass to weld.

with steel you can just run a flux core beads all goddam day and just chug along and get a welded steel hull done pretty quickly. but with anodized aluminum your only option is TIG. more than that, welding anodized aluminum is the exact opposite of TIG welding literally everything else; you're basically making a series of tack welds where you hit a single spot on the joind with really high amperage to break through the thick oxide layer, just long enough to feed a glob of filler rod into it before the shit burns through. Pic related, it's a typical anodized aluminum weld. due to the nature of welding it, aluminum oxide takes an awful lot longer to weld, and a lot of the typical weld joints are simply not possible. for example: forget about getting 100% penetration on thick pieces without an awful lot of grinding.

for these manufacturing considerations, steel is generally better for most large production vessels.

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Patently wrong you chimp.
collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/double-space
Then fuck off with your idiotic ESL level drivel. 2 out of your 3 postings has nothing to do with the topic.

computerhope.com/jargon/d/doubspac.htm
reddit.com/r/CasualConversation/comments/4xk1a8/do_you_use_a_double_space_after_a_sentence_or_a/
All due respect I think I know english better than you. Double spacing is doubling the space between lines of text. And reddit spacing is the characteristic double enter which they use to make their sentences not look like shit on a shitty coded website.

Jesus Christ then why did you even mention it?

Someone else would have to build a navy which can only fight cargo ships, or they'd waste their weaponry aimed at navy ships towards civilian shipping. I think east bloc only had these light subsonic weapons on aircraft.

That's true, but the point is that their hull is paper thin and made of stressed skin. It's kind of like that corrugated siding on a house, it doesn't provide any protection except from wind, picrel got penetrated by a tiny target drone.

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the hull may be thin but the structural members inside HAVE to be much thicker.

It's the difference between monocoque and semi-monocoque.

with monocoque structures the body is the frame and has all the rigidity to support its own weight and all expected stresses. this is good for things where you need a thick skin and don't mind a lower production time to fabricate all the thick steel body sections. pretty much all armored fighting vehicles are built like this. because the armor is so thick there's really no point to having a support frame.

semi-monocoque is where there's an internal skeleton to support everything, and the skin is just there to separate the inside from the outside. pretty much every large vessel is made this way. with strong internal members providing form and structure with a thin hull keeping the water out. the advantage to this is it allows for a lighter overall structure for the same displacement, so more internal volume can be devoted to more or heavier stuff.

even back when battleships were the queens of the sea, cruisers and below rarely had armor. this is because cruisers, destroyers, and frigates are not ships of the line; their jobs all require speed and endurance.

frigates are good for patrol and day-to-day connectivity in peacetime. in wartime they almost exlusively act as pickets to warn of incoming enemy fleets or as sub hunters.
Destroyers came about as specialized frigates configured to counter specific threats, i.e. sub destroyers, torpedo destroyers "for anti ship work," anti-aircraft destroyers, etc. over time they just combined all these roles into one and now destroyers just do all of those jobs by default.

Cruisers were developed specifically for the cruising mission. hence the name. typically frigates and later destroyers wuld perform this job as they're the ones that had the speed to do it. the problem was that neither was particularly good at punching up, being mostly configured for threats that weren't exactly on the same horizontal plane. so the cruiser was developed with the speed of a destroyer, better range, and better weaponry to effectively deal with whatever it could catch or couldn't outrun. while this typically necessitates a larger hull, the convention that there is a hard size association with the classes with frigates being smallest and cruisers being biggest, and destroyers being in the middle is inaccurate. the ships are big enough to perform their missions, and typically a destroyer can be just as big as a cruiser, and a frigate can be just as big as a destroyer. what matters is their role in the fleet, and there is a shitload of overlap between the three.

i told you all that to tell you this:
the ship classes we use today have been around for at least a hundred years, in the case of frigates it's been around since the 1650s, and they have never been armored.

hull construction techniques have not actually changed much since WW1, with most of the advancements occurring in armament, hydrodynamics, powerplant, meterial sciences, and superstructure.

while it's not exactly impossible to put anodized aluminum over steel, it's kind of not the thing you want to weld together. being vastly dissimilar metals and all. further it is very much easier to patch a hole in steel than it is to patch a hole in aluminum.

bee-tee-dubs, the skin of a vessel isn't actually that thin. it's all made from plate, which has a minumum thickness of 6mm, or 1/4". it's very easy to use plate that could stop small arms fire, but they sheer mass of the vessel combined with the forces at play mean that any time it contacts something of large mass it's going to fail and make a hole, and it's a lot easier to repair a hole in plate than it is to bang out a dent. it's actually the real reason why the USS Missouri still has that dent from when it got hit by a kamikaze. easier to leave it alone than to cut the whole section out and replace it.

remember, the USS Cole got a hole blown in the side of her, and she was back in service in about a year, which is pretty normal for a large vessel.

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Would something like a containerized Pershing 2 missile be game changing,as in a self contained system that fits in a shipping container for sneeky business?

I know they make shipping container missiles, but nothing like a Pershing 2.

Why not cargo versions of military ships?

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Please never post about naval history again. There is so much wrong with this post that I don't even know where to start.

let me tell you something about weaponized shipping containers.

I fucking hate them.

I hate them because they are stupidly effective. literally the only way to tell what's inside is to either open it up and look or hit it with an X-ray machine. both of which require you to be right next to it. you can literally disguise a VLS array as a stack of shippong containers and do to a region what the fifth fleet did to Iraq.

the US navy had an idea for a ship kind of like this, called the arsenal ship, that was basically just a big missile barge. pic related. it never really got approved because it's purpose-built to do only ONE thing, and you only really need that when you're at war with an opponent that can fight you on equal footing.

i got a story to tell you about when I was doing counter IED instructor course. they showed us this video where haji has built a bunch of rockets out of propane bottles, 100-gal rockets being he motor case and little bbq-sized tanks being the warhead. they loaded at least a hundred of these into a shipping trailer, angled like maybe 32° forward. they drove this tractor trailer setup to a spot, and left. when the shit went off it was in perfect position to shell the living FUCK out of a FOB a good ways away.

so yeah. using civilian commercial assets to do covert missile spam is a very effective strategy. not exactly a game-changer, but very hard to counter, especially from the sea.

because military vessels and cargo vessels are very different with very different needs.
military vessels NEED to be fast, and they NEED to be able to take a beating.

cargo vessels need to be durable and have lots of internal volume, and they need to be fuel efficient.

an tanker might work as a gunboat, but a frigate would be shit as a fleet oiler, for example.

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to be fair i'm not much of a naval historian.

I'm more than happy to hear the truth of the matter, though.

checked hitlertrips

Was pic related concept abandoned or was it just journalist fiction? Cause it looks really badass even though a bit too compact

Why didn't they show you FRESH FRUITS instead in IED class?

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Hear me out. Take a container ship sized vessel. Put a bunch of ports in the sides. Shove a 105mm gun through each port. Fire broadsides.

...

found the redditor

There is already an Emergency Retrofit Plan for civilian vessels like cargo ships…

Post it, nigger.

You could literally have x150 105mm guns on each side in a single row. You could technically have 600 guns on that thing

You're a fucking retard who doesn't understand his own language. Here, let me show you how you're supposed to format.

"The US military gets around its lack of expeditionary assets and small airlift capacity by prestaging heavy assets around the world on cargo ships. For about 20 years we had container ships full of M1 tanks ready to be sent to any hot zone that needed a heavy brigade.
Converting a container ship into an aircraft carrier isn't hard to do, actually. They're designed to be more stable when topheavy. This is why the mercy class had to have their superstructure deliberately overbuilt, so they wouldn't capsize with all that empty space inside. As for actual armed merchant vessels, it depends on what threats they face and how valuable the cargo they carry. Typically it's easier to just pair them with escorts, but some stuff like point defence systems, torpedo countermeasures, and ASW equipment would very much be useful."

This thread feels like deja vu.

Ive just been to this place before

Wouldn't you need to load that thing up with all the EW, AMS, and SAM you could physically fit on it to have a hope of getting within the ~11km range of the target ship? As in to the point where you're spending several times the cost of the ship and its arsenal just to make sure you don't get wrecked. Still, potentially worth it for the look on the other captains face when he sees what the fuck you're trying.

It's still going to be cheaper than buying a brand new carrier.

In fact, there's nothing stopping you from protecting your militarized cargo carrier/battleship with frigates/destroyers/escort boats.

How hard would it be to convert smaller coastal cargo vessels into poorfag missile destroyers?
What about ferries turned landing Zig Forumsraft?

Presumably about as hard as it would be to buy the missiles, build a homebrew launch rail and bodge together a 'push the button to fire' tier FCS.

Or even better.

Put artillery on ships, like your navy does:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerhaubitze_2000

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Dont forget that old red team/blue team greentext about war gaming done concerning the capabilities of iran.. The general that was given control of the hypothetical iran forces took the entire budget and industrial output of iran and used it to make an armada of nigger rigged speed boats that were to function as piloted torpedos. After being completely unable to keep up with naval poverty fleet zerg rush tactics…. the entire US Fleet was destroyed within hours. . That exercise did such a great job exposing a fatal flaw in our modern naval doctrine that the general who came up with that strategy was shit canned, and every lesson that should have been learned from it was ignored as best as possible.

Fuck militarizing cargo ships… fit 6 gorillion jetskits with 20mm guns and a contact mine on the nose.

MERCHANT FLEETS WHEN?

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Was this with CIWS or without CIWS?

I will die happy knowing that my idea would revitalize the idea of battleship.

Can you imagine a small cargo ship armed with at least 02 of these babies? Protected by fighters?

Goddamn.

I've never been entirely clear on the lessons that came out of that wargame, because I've heard alot of contradictory points on the matter. On one hand, it did reveal that a carrier group was vulnerable to large amounts of small missile carrying craft. On the other, the red team general may have pulled some bullshit that exploited the limits of the wargame itself. The excessive continued since ending at that point would have been a massive waste of time and resources.

Of course, I refuse to comment on this because we have never seen the test itself.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

Tbh, it sounds like Red team was smarter but was "gaming" the system, while Blue team was really an impatient faggot who got mad he got played.

Millennium Challenge 2002, yes. As I take it, it shows that an analog-tech military force fighting smart, dirty and quiet with a decentralized command chain and a roughly unified plan of action will kick the shit out of a modern force that is- at least at the command level- overly convinced of its own invincibility and victory.

I don't know, is it outside the limits of the simulation to use motorcycle couriers in place of knocked out fiber optics and monitorable wireless, light signals in place of air control communication, preventing Blue from knowing what you're doing? Is it outside the limits to shut down active AA radar in order to preserve the equipment against a shock-and-awe attack targeted through electronic warfare? Is it outside the limits to go for broke with a counterbarrage of cruise missiles sinking a carrier, ten cruisers and all but one of six amphibious landing craft? Is it outside the limits of the simulation to followup with E-boat and suicide fireship attacks to start tearing apart the disorganized remains of the Blue Team battlegroup? Is it outside the limits of the simulation to make an actual counterstrategy and play to win?

Because, if so, you agree wholeheartedly with the Blue Team, who went on to prescript the scenario very heavily in a way that ensured an avalanche victory for Blue. As a result, the whole lesson learned from what happens when a modern enemy army goes analog and simply fights completely around modern electric communication is ignored. And, if Iraq or Iran or whatever other Red state might fit the simulation had somehow directly or indirectly emulated the strategy when we went for the kill- unlikely, but a real possibility- we could've been slaughtered. Arab military incompetence and their ultimately playing into the Blue Team favoring scenario that was forced on Van Riper is possibly the only thing preventing the jarheads from getting slaughtered on the beaches or in the holds.

Honestly, I think the entire thing turned into a sham, with a purely political and meta-strategic motive behind refloating Blue Team and doing it over with a script. If it gets into the news in big bold text, "$250 MILLION US OFFENSIVE EXERCISE RESULTS IN NU-VARIAN DISASTER" then people will start to talk. People might take far too close a notice. They- enemies of the US state-military apparatus- might really think about emulating what they learned. So you split that headline up by rerunning the experiment for success under what is technically the same exercise, rather than having to embarassingly do a formal second run, emphasize the success of the new scripted totally-not-second run and the overall 'positive' nature of the 'experiment,' and most importantly make sure the headline isn't running especially long outside specialist circles, IE military magazines or the like. And then you fecklessly go ahead with your poisoned strategic conclusion, and avoid catastrophe through dumb luck.

The MC 2002 challenge was ultimately limited by the kind of software in use at the time of the event and had the absolute fuck exploited out of it by the red team who played the simulation like a video game instead of a role play as Iran. (which is the point of a military exercise, not to "win") Leading to tactics like launching literally every missile in the countries entire inventory all at once based off a single pay phone call and the suicide boat attacks which only succeeded because the AI was not programed to ever target civilian ships are things that would work in a sterile environment with robotic captains that make no mistakes and also are incapable of learning that the conga line of fishing trawlers causally putting into your fleet at 20 knots and exploding one after another are in fact the enemy. Its just clickbait for slavaboos who want to act like "carrier groups are easily sunk by a motorcycle and a payphone using this one weird trick!" and don't want to actually read into the real conditions of the exercise because the truth of the matter more lies with Riper learning how to play gookgraft while he was in worst Korea and using those skills to cause a scene at a public event for personal notoriety.

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Was this true?

I think you've largely misunderstood my perspective. I'm not claiming in the that the results of Ripper's tactics weren't valid. Rather, I've read accounts of the wargame that claim that the tactics Ripper used weren't properly accounted for in the resources available to each player, essentially leading to a borderline "exploit" of the wargame's rules. While it's been years since I've read the article (which is why I didn't make any direct claim against the results), but what I remember being brought up included:
From my understanding, this tactic was assumed to carry the same level of speed and effectiveness as direct wireless comms. Essentially Ripper was issuing commands as if he was using the normal system, but stating that his orders were being ferried by couriers.
Weren't many of those launched from ships that couldn't possible mount the missiles, or could theoretically but only after major conversions?
I was under the impression that it was more a situation where all these assets were on hand for the purpose of the wargame, so having them just sit in timeout would have been a massive waste. Even if you say that most of the landing ships were sunk, it still makes sense to get the landing practice in regardless.

As I've said, I don't disagree with the lessons that came from the first round. Rather, I think people assume that since the games were restarted that the lessons were entirely ignored. I refuse to believe that the military didn't note what had happened, but instead took the lesson then restarted to keep the game going to learn further lessons.

That sounds plausible, but I can't imagine that the US wouldn't have still suffered awful casualties from the tactics in play. Dear, am I become the biased BLUFOR nigger now?

Possible, but not something I saw reading up on the subject a little more. Considering how many orders he actually has to give, would this have changed much on an operational scale simulation under a decentralized 'muh in command but not control' chain? Delays of minutes or hours? Does that matter if the subordinates already have their orders and are acting on them independently?

I did read some accounts/opinions that say as much, and some counteropinions that cast skepticism on how 'major' said conversions would actually be, and considering the coarseness of the simulation, whether that actually matters. Because assuming one goes by the notion of, 'those Cessna and speedboat standins couldn't possibly carry those weapons!'- nevermind the conflicting accounts of exactly what they were standing in as- one has to ask, 'so why is it fine that the US gets projected boondoggle like aircraft lasers and tiltrotor craft functioning perfectly as they would on paper?'

If BLUFOR gets shit that's in development and never actually bears fruit in the real time of the future projection, I think it was to 2007 but with really heavy fudging of what was actually coming online by then, why exactly is it damning that REDFOR, in command of a hypothetical Iranaq nation state (which by one snippet I read was actually modeled after a rogue section of Israel in particular) has some fast attack craft with somewhat fudged tonnage and radar signatures? If they'd been different ships, would this have made any actual difference in the massive radio silent shock attack, and if it did would it have ceased having a highly disproportionate kill/loss ratio? Assuming isn't talking out of his bum or being misled by apologists/misinformation when he states the targeting for covert enemy assets was fouled up. I could believe that, but I personally don't believe the audacious 'the navy was teleported offshore! We never would've closed to that distance!' story having a better than 50/50 chance of being an excuse for suicidal overconfidence.

Continued.

Certainly. But it seems to me that the way they handled the reset and the way it's been handled after has been with embarrassment and with intent to mitigate that embarrassment, hoping to have a 'victorious' demonstration and ultimately brush the massive contrary failure under the rug.

I say they should've played out the 'BLUFOR dead in a day' scenario all of the way through, then rebooted it, sheepishly congratulated Riper on the victory, and identified issues with the simulation to run again at least twice over, under the assumption that most of the $250 million was spent on the simulator development and on wanton corruption. Once with Riper pulling his same gambit or a similar one, but with any smulator issues corrected, and once with Riper under roleplaying constrictions against going full analog VC nightmare from the very start. And never being told, 'you're not allowed to missile strike the tiltrotors! Or use the chemical weapons! Because reasons!' A further third time could be run with van Riper going full VC, and the BLUFOR allowed to explicitly counter-counterplan against the analog enemy. But that would be rational, and probably expensive, because costs to do the exercise again would magically inflate to fill up some four and five-star pocketbooks & black project slush funds.

I likewise refuse to believe these puffed-up jingoist featherheads and Israeli-abiding toesuckers are incapable of such a wanton display of stupidity. It seems terribly in character with all manner of other real and feigned incompetence in strategy or in procurement.

It was a joke but it also seriously wouldn't surprise me seeing the cheese he pulled

Nowadays shit like that doesn't surprise me anymore.

NOW.
zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-11/uk-unveils-plan-transform-navy-converting-ferries-warships

Russians are selling this as a product.

They're especially meant for their own new modular patrol ships (Project 22160 and Project 23550) Paket-NK (torpedoes) and Club-NK (cruise and anti-ship), which are pretty fucking radical…

Pfft, where is my container compatible self-propelled howitzer?

inb4 just bolt it on the germans did

Isn't disguising regular troops as non combatants a war crime?

Higher on the street
And I know it's my time to go

Fairly sure that has to do with infantry wearing civilian clothing or enemy uniforms to avoid detection. Q-ships have been a thing for a long damn time, plus I'm fairly certain that as long as you display the correct flag before firing it doesn't count.

The Hague Conventions of 1907 say that every warship has to have clear naval markings in order to be a legal combatant. The intent of the law was obviously to ban Q-ships altogether, but the anglos creatively reinterpreted the law so that flying a naval jack on a ship with civilian markings five seconds before the attack counts as "military markings" (and then blamed Germany when they quite justifiably started treating civilian vessels as enemy combatants, which is exactly why Q-ships were banned in the first place).

It was during the cold war, but when USSR collapsed the retards in Washington began to think they were God-kings, and nothing could stop them. Which is why George sr, Bill, George jr, Barry and Donald unilaterally meaning one-sided, with no warning or discussion about the pullout pulled America out of about a hundred international agreements. Which permitted Russia to essentially build many Project Pluto-like superweapons they had napkin designs of but never really built before.

Funnily enough Finland built an AMOS container.

Wearing enemy uniforms is specifically ALLOWED by international law, but until about 2007 hiding military assets as civilian ones was illegal. Also stupid because then your civilians get pasted but…. whatever.

The major powers already figured out by the 17-18th century that merchant vessels converted to fight are not as effective as purpose built ships. If you're talking about cargo vessels to transport military gear, it would work well enough, but it would need quite a bit of protection during wartime.
An or/k/ carrier for or/k/ purposes would be sweet though, you could essentially make a colony ship out of one, and I believe that both half and full Zig Forums have had several threads in this regard.

Duh. But they're cheaper so you can have more of them.