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Comment by chihuahua | Hacker News Reader

I agree in principle, but I am not aware of any nuclear powered battleships. Iowa class BBs have steam turbines running on fuel oil.

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Not battleships, but America did have several nuclear powered cruisers which lasted around 15-30 years (but all were decommissioned in the 90s.) They weren't battleships, but that term is sometimes used colloquially to refer to any surface warship other than carriers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_cruisers_of_th...

> but that term [battleships] is sometimes used colloquially to refer to any surface warship other than carriers

Really? I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone call a frigate a cruiser or a littoral combat ship a destroyer or an amphibious assault ship a carrier but everyone knows battleships are the biggest big-gun ships out there.

I think so, at least for some people who don't have an interest in military stuff or machines generally. Similar to the way any armored but unarmed truck may sometimes be called "a tank." (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=police+tank&iax=images&ia=i...)

I try not to judge, I'm probably equally wrong without knowing it about things as far outside my area of interest.

I would not be surprised if many people who don't have knowledge of naval vessels would use "battleship" as a generic term for "surface naval vessel". A possible driver of this could be the "Battleship" game.

I would also not be surprised if there were many people who'd never heard the terms "destroyer" or "cruiser".

But the "Battleship" game has five different kinds of ships, only one of which it calls a battleship, and it does include cruisers and destroyers.

“Warship” would be the correct colloquialism, I think - battleships were specifically characterised by heavy armour and large caliber guns.

Does the USA even have a battleship?

I thought they were obsolete.

They're obsolete. There was some debate in the 90s and 00s over whether they should be kept around since they had an incredible amount of firepower and some people still thought that maybe contested beach landings were a good idea. But ultimately they were stricken from the Navy and are now museum ships.

He's technically correct. All zero of the US navy's battleships are nuclear powered

The best kind of correct!

Correct me if I’m wrong haven’t Iowa class battleships all been decommissioned sometime in the early 1990s?

Yes, and it was a colossal waste of money keeping them running even that long. Realistically they should have been scrapped in the period after the Korean war.

It has been proposed that the reason the battleships were in Pearl Harbor was so they would be the ships sunk when the Japanese attacked. The aircraft carriers were all far out to sea.

Whether this is true, it shows that the obsolescence of battleships (since aircraft carriers came on line) was recognized well before WWII.

Pearl Harbor converted the US in the Pacific from a 17 knot navy to a 25 knot navy.

We did get five of the eight battleships back (although some were basically cored out like a rotten tooth and rebuilt almost from scratch.) Two ships were left there (Utah and Arizona). Oklahoma was raised mostly to free up its slot in the harbor, but sank in 1947 while being towed to San Francisco Bay to be scrapped.

The BB's role in the Pacific War was as AA platforms and for shore bombardment.

aircraft carriers?

All of America's supercarriers have been nuclear powered since the USS Kitty Hawk was decommissioned in 2009.

But if you include "amphibious assault ships" like the Wasp class, which can carry a lot of helicopters and STOVL airplanes like the F-35B and Harrier, then US Navy still has a lot of conventional powered carriers.

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