Battleship thread because they are Badass

Missiles are still less useful than aircraft. Missiles are one and done, aircraft can be used again and again and in more than one role.

Attached: 1318999196897.jpg (2100x1500, 908K)

There's pretty strong evidence from Operation Crossroads that if Iowa was braced for a nuke, it and the crew would likely survive in full operational readiness. You'd need to send people out in protective gear to decontaminate the ship, but the citadel itself (and the crew, at battle stations, protected within) is VERY unlikely to be penetrated by anything but a contact detonation of a nuclear warhead.

And this was with 1940s steel armor. No composites, no DU.

That's why I suspect we're overlooking the capabilities of a modern armored warship. Imagine we all build armorless tanks like the Leopard 1, and then it was discovered that a Pershing shrugged off modern missiles to the turret.

There's no need for a flat, straight through flight deck to deploy a useful complement of aircraft. You need supercarriers for jet fighters, but you don't need a supercarrier for a VTOL drone. Carriers need large, strike-capable aircraft because that's the primary armament of a carrier. The primary armament of a battleship is it's guns and missiles. Missiles are expensive, long range, and expendable, but gunfire is cheap, cheerful, and dreadfully short ranged. They complement each other well.

I like battleships. I like the different designs, different eras, and different ideas behind their roles. None of that carries over into today. The resources and costs of a heavily armored warships are not justifiable or practical. It all peaked with the Iowa class because even in the 1940s, it was realized where things were headed. The Montana class was scrapped, sadly before at least one could be completed.
Having a ship focused on large guns is mostly pointless because missiles have much greater range and striking power. The areas where guns are better are sustained fire rate, cost of ammunition, and a "cool" factor.
At most, a modern "battleship" would just be an arsenal ship full of VLS cells. Or a glorified monitor where the armor is not the concern, and even then the guns are used alongside missiles. At that point, are either of those really battleships? Or is there just that big of a desire to have the BB designation in use again?

Attached: 1548273373825.jpg (1450x1840, 792K)

I find that arguing in favour of battleships is a losing argument, but at the same time arguing for battleships gives you a more in-depth understanding of why it's a bad idea (and makes a good thought experiment as to whether carriers really are the be all and end all of warfare).

Pull turrets off of Iowa, Install VLS in barbettes. Done.

Perhaps leave the front two turrets alone and do that with the rear turret? Wonder how many missiles it could hold just by removing one and still retaining gun fire support.

Because measure 22 camo w/a red anti-slip deck would be peak MURICA

Attached: plate14.jpg (645x150, 17K)

And to add to that keep the tomahawk missile launchers it already has or update them at least.

Carriers are mind blowingly good at power projection. They're fucking insanely good at it in a way a battleship can never be. A supercarrier like a Nimitz or Ford carriers approximately two and a half Canadas worth of airforce. They have a range as far as their aircraft can fly. You can park a Nimitz OUTSIDE the Gulf and enforce a total naval blockade and no fly zone around Iran, without ever entering Iranian waters. Do that with an Iowa. You'd need a full fleet, and you'd have to physically enter the Gulf with your capital ships. And you couldn't enforce a no-fly-zone. So if battleships have a place in a modern navy, power projection isn't it. Carriers are so good at gunboat diplomacy that they make gunboats, ironically, irrelevant.

So if there's a role, it's as a support ship or surface combatant / escort for carriers. This is where I think there might maybe be a role for a modern battlecruiser with at least a few big guns. It's a survivable, fire-drawing target that denies the enemy the ability to close with your carrier. Distribute the sensors across the entire taskforce and air assets so your battleship/battlecruiser can just tank missiles without degrading it's fighting ability; and no ship in the world today could hope to close with your carriers.

The, uh, minor problem here is that there's pretty much already nobody stupid enough to run down a Nimitz and her full battlegroup with surface ships. So if China builds a Kirov-with-Guns to run down carrier groups, then maybe we can justify a battlecruiser.

Gonna have to lawyer this one. Don't make arguments. Just roll the tape and let the evidence speak for itself. That's your persuasion.

Look at what the Zumwalt was originally going to be: a ship for fighting on the surface and supporting amphibious landings with its guns. That's what Congress and the Navy figured would replace the Iowa class when they were deactivated for the final time.
The guns ended up being inoperable because the ammunition wasn't there and the lowest price I saw for one round was 1/3 of a tomahawk for a 6in shell. Even with bulk production I don't know how much more that would go down. Price would also likely go up once again when the guns and shells were scaled back up to battleship caliber.

No class of ship is the end-all of naval warfare and never has been. That was the trap multiple nations fell into when they went off on a spree of building Dreadnoughts thinking that would secure their naval dominance just because they had the most or the biggest. Then functional subs & carriers came along and torpedoes drastically improved.

Attached: All_Four_Iowas.jpg (2781x2084, 2.56M)

Remove the 5" guns, dummy.

It's irrelevant anyways because the Iowas are basically beyond servicing. They're closing on a hundred years old. Metal fatigue will sink them before China does. If there's any place for a battleship, it would be new-build.

One of the bigger problems with the Iowas was the age of everything. Particularly the engines and finding spare parts and personnel who knew how to work them.

You do know the iowas have a on board system in place that prevents the metal from deteriorating right? It also gives an alert when metal does reach that state,

Zumwalt was a failure, but writing off surface gunnery entirely because a tech demo had cost overruns seems ridiculous. The shells were a boondoggle. Either go high cost, with ridiculously impressive performance (ramjet shells would be a hot meme), or just fire fucking WW2 era HE shells. One is cheap, one is useful in a surface action.

Let me propose a theoretical surface combatant and we can break down why it's stupid more usefully than "laugh at Zumwalt". It would need the speed and endurance of a carrier, so we're probably talking about something resembling a Virginia class. We want gunnery that's both effective and cheap with as long a range as possible. Let's choose four autoloaded 8" guns. Nothing special, no railgun memes. Keep two types of shell on hand – cheap HE, and a gun launched hypersonic missile. We want the "survivable" systems to be comms, the guns, the engines, and enough reserve flotation to keep it from sinking. All of these will be armored as well as possible within the displacement. We'll include the same radar and missile systems as a Burke for parts commonality and because we don't honestly expect the radar to survive an engagement anyways. Good aviation facilities, primarily for distributing sensors with UAVs. Tell me why this ship is a bad idea.

Good analysis. Eve when a battleship is the center of the force, it still needs carriers. The inverse of that is not true.
Carriers have more utility in warfare and in other roles nation with a global presence is expected to do.

Attached: Battleships super image.jpg (1600x1600, 473K)

That can prevent rust and corrosion from damaging the ships hulls too badly, but eventually the belt itself will be old and brittle. I wouldn't trust the Iowa's armor. It's simply too old, and we haven't replaced the belts. I'm not sure we can replace the belt.

>Tell me why this ship is a bad idea
samefagging here but it's a thought exercise so who cares

What if China builds an identical ship, but 20% larger, and with 10" guns? Well, of course, Congress would have to authorize a larger ship, armored against 10" guns and equipped with 12" guns...

So you either get into a modern dreadnought armsrace, which is a great meme and I fully support it but also recognize that's a bad idea; or you go as big as you can from the start. 16" guns, thick composite armor, multiple reactors...and now you're spending more on your "carrier escort" than you are on your carrier. Battleships aren't cost effective, and any cost effective battleship is begging to be one-upped by a slightly less cost effective battleship.

That tech demo is the standards that would be expected. I don't agree with it, but no one in a position to determine it would allow "dumb" shells to be used. They want boosted range with rockets or other means, computer guidance, and precision. Which means high cost.

>Let's choose four autoloaded 8" guns
That alone would solidify this design as a heavy cruiser rather than a battleship or battlecruiser.
There's no defined cut-off but over a century of precedent would determine this.

Everything else sounds decent enough but even these 8in guns would not be used much. Aircraft would be supporting a landing and if you encounter enemy surface forces then missiles would be used first (Unless you're saying the only missiles this ship has is the gun-launched ones. Which would seem very limited.) Guns would become the last resort, as they are on surface ships now.
And I don't even know how to start figuring out how thick the armor of the citadel would need to be to protect against modern ASMs.

I was actually thinking of the possibility of China building a battlecruiser with guns in the not-so-distant future. Specifically railguns if they actually have them working and want to make some kind of show of it by mounting multiple on a ship.
If they did, I don't see it igniting a race because there is nothing gained by working to match that capability. It would not hold a spot in US doctrine. It boils down to propaganda and dickwaving.
Adding armor means more weight, which means stronger propulsion needed to keep the performance, which means bigger ships, which means a larger citadel because more reactors, which means yet more armor.

As you said, it stops being cost-effective or efficient.

>Tell me why this ship is a bad idea.

A gun launched hypersonic missile is a shitty version of a VLS launched vertical missile, and you have 3 more guns than you need. You're making a shitty Burke with less general-purpose ability and inferior anti-ship firepower.

>but what about the shore bombardment with dumb HE race (aka how to kill the most kids for CNN while missing actual enemies)

Mount 4 HIMARs with GMLRS on the deck of an amphib, back of a Burke, or on a simple container ship. Add extra missile pods as necessary.
20 crew for the container ship. 1 marine squad for security, radio watch, and pressing the fire button on the launchers. Easy.

Attached: 013489.jpg (3716x1858, 413K)

Modern ASMs actually don't tend to have huge warheads because nobody is building battleships, and because huge warheads are huge. A missile wants to be as small and fast as possible. So you see a lot of things like the Naval Strike Missile with 125kg warheads. I think a gross oversimplification but useful for a thumbnail sketch would be to assume warhead and armor technology has advanced at roughly the same rate, and simply look at warhead weight versus armor thickness. If a 4" deck with WW2 armor can survive a 1000lb HE bomb, I'd suggest a similar weight of armor could likely stop a modern 1000lb warhead.

youtube.com/watch?v=H8e5sgjI4Zg

What keeps bringing me back to "what if battleships dude" is how advanced and light weight modern armor has gotten compared to the downright primitive "loadsa steel" armor of the last battleships. Nobody's ever even tried so much as spaced armor on a battleship (torpedo defenses notwithstanding).

>It boils down to propaganda and dickwaving.
That's quite often a reason states do things though.

But here’s the thing.
It’s not hard to build a big fuckoff missile that can murder any reasonable amount of armor.

AShMs are here to stay. And it will ALWAYS be cheaper to develop and deploy a bigger missile then it will be to develop a ship with more armor.
“But wait” I hear you cry, “what about installing an anti-missile system?”
That’s a good idea. Let’s do that. Let’s see, you can only make a ship so big. So in order to fit, you’d have to remove the big fuck off guns. Since you don’t have enormously vulnerable magazines anymore, you can reduce the armor on those sections. And hey, since you’re not going to be hit by any missiles, you might as well reduce the armor all around. Since you have less armor, your ship can be smaller for the same punch. And you know, while we’re shrinking it, we should make it even smaller so we can build it in more shipyards. It’ll also make it cheaper, so we can make more ships. Since we have more ships, we don’t need hundreds of missiles and OH DEAR we just made a destroyer.

>what are multistage HEAT warheads like BROACH

Navies wouldn't even need new ASHMs, they could simply swap out warheads to BTFO any "modern" armorship.

>You need to remove the big guns to fit an anti-missile system
You what?

Let's use the Iowas as an example because they actually were retrofitted with antimissile systems (Phalanx). You could replace every 5" DP mount with three or more Goalkeeper systems, ESSM cells, SeaRAM systems, etc etc; and not even touch the main armament. Missile defenses are expensive, but take up fairly small amounts of weight. If you make your missiles bigger and bigger, you're doing a few things. You're making them more and more expensive, you're carrying fewer of them on the same ships, and you're drastically increasingly the likelihood of a successful intercept. And all this to carry a 3000lb shaped charge warhead specialized against precisely one ship in the taskgroup. At that point it's damn near cheaper to build big guns of your own. And if your battleship does end up taking a Shipwreck-sized missile to the face? It'll probably still float, and you'd rather tank hits with a battleship than your squishy and valuable carrier.

Then why isn't armor obsolete on tanks? It's just a question of scale. Thicker armor, bigger missiles. Nobody is suggesting dumb 12" thick steel belts. You can use some seriously big (meter+) spaced armor gaps, DU inserts, reactive armor, metal foams, anything you'd find on a modern tank can be scaled up for a battleship. You also get extra options not available on a tank like filling your spaced armor with fuel oil, or layering defenses several meters thick.

And then a single nuclear torpedo explodes under the keel and ends all the silly discussion about armor.

Battleships, idk, I could see modern Battlecruisers maybe, especially ones that could do 35 knots with modern gas turbine engines. Imagine the glory of GPS guided 15 inch guns...

And all those disadvantages would be entirely worth it if it meant sinking the multi-billion dollar battleship. And it can also be used on the OTHER big, fuck-off, “This thing must die right the fuck now” target.

Because tanks aren't trying to survive top-attacks from heavy ATGMs without APS.

Battleships are, but they have no justification of direct-fire from land vehicles/troops. Use APS instead of belts.

You know, like every other ship.

And of course, I should add that these battleships would be basically useless for the primary thing that makes them different. I.e, big guns. Because a missile is point blank better in every respect other than cost.
So you would be building a multi billion dollar ship that’s not much more difficult to kill than a carrier, while being about as functionally useful as a couple destroyers.

>ywn watch your cute range trap gf(male) dance around in nothing but a see-through bodystocking on the deck of USS Missouri

Why even live?

youtube.com/watch?v=BsKbwR7WXN4

"top attacks" are a solved issue for battleship design since WW2 – thick fuck off deck armor on the citadel, with all the superstructure bits (accommodations, mess hall, kitchens, laundry, etc etc) unarmored. You're not trying to protect the whole ship, just the magazines, engines, and enough volume to float.

>Use APS instead of belts
Literally nobody is saying not to use active protection, both hard and soft-kill. In fact, a modern battleship would operate as part of a task group, and would both provide and receive protection from all the other ships in the vicinity. The justification for actual armor is that smaller missiles won't do anything, and larger missiles are big enough to reliably shoot down. Right now, a Burke can get fucked by a single Exocet or Harpoonski that gets through CIWS. Ignoring armor entirely because "muh speed" and "muh APS" is a flawed concept. A missile or two will always get through.

never knew about this, epic!

>"top attacks" are a solved issue for battleship design since WW2 – thick fuck off deck armor on the citadel, with all the superstructure bits (accommodations, mess hall, kitchens, laundry, etc etc) unarmored. You're not trying to protect the whole ship, just the magazines, engines, and enough volume to float.

armored decks were never good enough for bombs and guided bombs
plunging fire maybe

But by the time you've built a large enough warship to reliably sink a battleship by spamming massive missiles, you basically have a Kirov, and more vulnerable to the enemy missiles because you lack the armor to survive something Harpoon sized.

You're right but only because most battleships were built before naval aviation proved to be so lethal. Simply splitting your deck up to provide spaced armor (with the superstructure being the space, RIP galley) and using modern composites provides a quantum leap over WW2 capabilities. Nobody's bothered to update battleship defense plans since WW2, because we haven't built any.

>What are your arguments for a modern battleship?

make it a drone launcher for spamming high altitude jdam drones over the coast of china

Little known fact: The guitarist in the Jimi Hendrix t-shirt is Cher's son, Elijah Allman. He was 13 when this video was shot.

Imagine being 13 and watching your mom dance around in that outfit in front of 2000 horny sailors.

What if you had a ship that was identical in every way to a Burke, but could tank smaller missiles, RPGs, the odd mine, etc? It would be strictly superior to a Burke, the only question is how much this would cost.

The future is CGs. CCGNs for vanity projects.

Attached: t1yan3k3kibfowdh6jgb.jpg (800x840, 144K)

What level was the 5" gun firecontrol ever retrofitted to? Were they actually effective at point defense, or basically just too expensive to remove?

they removed some during the refit

That was the New Jersey during Vietnam 1968-1969 i believe. I'm sure the 5in were effective for defense due to higher rate of fire compared to the 16in but i doubt they were ever really needed ever used but i could be wrong.

I mean air/missile defense. The 5" gun was a great heavy AA weapon in it's prime, but if they never upgraded the WW2 firecontrol it would be rather useless against missiles.

I may sound silly asking about the missile defense capabilities of such a large caliber weapon, but fire a missile at a Burke and you'll see the 5" gun firing back.

Attached: Capt.-Snyder-in-pool.png (361x248, 103K)

>Japanese soldier waterboarded at gunpoint, USS Iowa, 1944, decolorized

No as far as i know they never did. I know they definitely kept the original WW2 fire control for the 16in guns up through the gulf war and until retirement because it was so damn accurate. But yeah they would never bother with those 5in anyway too obsolete

That's sorta why I think a new build battleship would be so much more effective than what people think. Imagine if those were modern 5"/54 Mk45 mounts under modern fire control. Fuck your missile, fuck your plane, fuck your boat, fuck everything in a 20nm radius.

Agreed

>what is MADFIRES

A 57mm does it better.

No. Anything a gun can do, a missile can do better. Full stop

That's literally not true. Full stop.

>What are your arguments for a modern battleship?
the modern battleship is a super-destroyer like the zumwalt with either rocket assisted shells or railgun. it out-guns poor countries gunboats and also capable of shelling few 100 miles inland. armor is replaced by active defense measures.

>sustained fire
>minimum engagement range
>launch velocity
>velocity period, if you don't have hypersonic AShMs in widespread use
>warhead mass fraction
>armor penetration
>immune to soft-kill countermeasures
>resilient against hard-kill countermeasures
There's a reason nobody has done away with guns entirely and nobody plans to. Don't be stupid. Missiles are superior to guns in a surface engagement between equal forces only because of their range. There is most certainly a place for guns in naval design. The only question is "how big".

missiles take up space for 6-10 shells minimum. so sustained shelling would be the exception.

>resilient against hard-kill countermeasures
that's not really true anymore tho.

>There's a reason nobody has done away with guns entirely and nobody plans to
Because retards like you are always around to go BUT WHAT ABOUT MUH SHORE BOMBARDMENT?!

Depends exactly what you're firing and what your target is being defended by. A 5"+ armor piercing shell is unnecessary for actual penetration (because nobody uses armor) but would shrug off something like a Phalanx or other 20-30mm PDC.

"Retards like me" don't make naval procurement decisions, nigger. If you're putting me on the same level as actual admirals, I'm apparently way above Jow Forums's paygrade.

>list 9 reasons guns are useful
>none of them are shore bombardment
>MUH SHORE BOMBARDMENT

Attached: 430.jpg (699x485, 60K)

Can a missile help dilate the tranny seaman?

>larger and more bulky than a shell
>more expensive than a shell
>long minimum distance
99% of all targets dont need a shell
speedboats, MG nests, infantry, sampans do not need a missile and asymmetrical targets like those are the future of combat

And you aren’t hitting those with an unguided shell. Besides that, things like Hellfire exists, or if you’re really on a budget, laser guided Hydras.

guns are pretty accurate
missiles are more accurate, but at a certain point more accuracy doenst translate to more effectiveness because your enemies have no stealth and move at running pace
your ability to fire at more targets for a longer period of time with good enough accuracy is more useful than a few shots and extreme accuracy

Minimum distance and launch velocity are underrated for point defense but kinda useless in a ship to ship role. The only advantage big guns have over missiles against sea targets is speed (potentially), magazine size, and a 100% warhead mass fraction.

Gun launched missiles have the advantage of good initial velocity and a short minimum engagement distance.

>you aren't hitting a speedboat with an unguided shell
yeah I forgot, before missiles existed torpedo boats ran completely rampant and unchecked, making the battleship totally obsolete by 1919

oh actually that's not at all true and even century old fire control is better than you seem to think modern fire control is

Seriously, are you retarded, intentionally obtuse, or woefully undeducated? I bet all three, because Jow Forums.

>sustained fire
Which is irrelevant when you can hit first time.
>minimum engagement range
If the bad guys get that close, you’re fucked anyway.
>launch velocity
Irrelevant
>velocity period, if you don't have hypersonic AShMs in widespread use
Also irrelevant
>armor penetration
I thought ships were throughly unarmored now? Besides, it’s easy to make a missile that can pierce any armor you got.
>immune to soft-kill countermeasures
>resilient against hard-kill countermeasures
Literally the only two advantages. An$ even then they aren’t that big of a deal.

no i think the guns on modern navy ships are more about "oh you got a 100 motorboat missileship technical somali pirate thing going on? how cute..." same for helicopters. that 5" naval gun can really clean up swarms of lesser things.

So far we have
>declares self infallible
>thinks guns can't hit moving targets
>calls everyone in naval procurement retards
>brings up shore bombardment completely unprompted, never debunks it
>ignores all other reasons given, declares missiles to be perfect and sent by christ himself
Why even post here?

>launch velocity is irrelevant
>velocity is irrelevant period
Good thing we all use fucking biplanes loaded with bombs, guys, velocity is irrelevant, we're really thinking outside the box here

Also Phalanx? Useless. 76mm OTO guns? Useless. Get rid of all the guns. user has declared there's no need for point defense inside 5km.

>sustained fire is irrelevant
Enjoy eating shit and dieing the first time the enemy shoots down a salvo I guess

>be modern frigate
>launch your 8 harpoons
>they get shot down
good thing sustained fire is irrelevant or you'd be left with no offensive weapons

>yeah I forgot, before missiles existed torpedo boats ran completely rampant and unchecked, making the battleship totally obsolete by 1919

3 different classes of ships were created just to check threat of torpedo boats

>battleship totally obsolete by 1919
yeah, welcome to real world

>oh actually that's not at all true and even century old fire control is better than you seem to think modern fire control is

yeah its so amazing its was barely used in last 80 years

and you gonna do what ? charge opposing vessel so you could get in gun fight?

>3 different classes of ships were created just to check threat of torpedo boats
How did they do that? Guns can't hit speedboats, even with modern technology. You just said that. You wouldn't have been wrong, right? Speedboats cannot be stopped by guns. You said it yourself, right here ()

In fact, you also said guns can't hit infantry or even fortified positions. I bet the artillery branch will be really upset when we tell them they, in fact, haven't killed anyone.

Why bother? When you're so demonstrably retarded that your own posts are contradictory, and you contradict yourself WITHIN ONE POST, why make posts? Fucking put a trip on so we can filter you.

It turns out that there is more water on this planet than the Pacific. I've heard rumours of certain locations, like "the Gulf" or "the Taiwan strait", where ships might even be in eyesight of each other! Not every battle is engaged at continental distances.

please name one gun battle in Operation Praying Mantis

calm your tits, i only replied to your post once you dumb fuck, you are the one who lives in dream world where naval guns fights rage on daily basis

>lol it wasn't me
yeah ok sure you didn't just btfo yourself we'll play pretend

>reeeee guns bad reeeee
So you want to take all of the other guy's arguments as your own, but don't want to defend them? Why not present literally any argument of your own, then?

Here’s the thing though. There’s only two ways a speedboat is going to be dangerous to a warship. A) it’s got AShMs, or B) it’s got a big fuckoff bomb. If A, then even a retarded driver is going to launch those missiles from beyond the range of your guns. If B, well they have to get close, but that’s what things like helicopters are for.

hmmm

it's almost like land-launched AShMs, maritime patrol aircraft, and boarding boats can control important places better than big guns on armored deathtraps.

my argument is very simple, naval guns have really only niche role and will continue to have niche role till end of time, naval vessels these days to begin with are no designed to surface combat with some exception of coastal craft
usefulness of naval guns is miniscule

An Iranian oil platform shot at the Merrill with 23mm guns, the Merrill replied with a 5" gun to silence the fire of the oil platform. SAG Charlie had all of their Harpoons miss against an Iranian FAC, it was crippled with Standards but did not sink, it was sunk with the deck guns. USS Gary shot down a missile with her 3" gun. And on and on. Plenty of rounds were fired by both sides, and that's just a Wikipedia-tier overview.

And of course, you still can use AShM on speedboats. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the event of a swarm of obviously hostile craft, any Captain would do just that. It’s not like they’re going to go “Yeah, well there’s a hundred little boats out there that want to kill us. But we don’t really need to use missiles. Just use the gun, it’ll save the taxpayer money”

Unfortunately the battleship is only nigh invincible from a few angles.

Battleships were very vulnerable to plunging fire which would slam shells through their vulnerable decks to explode inside the ship.

These days the Russians and Chinese both have anti ship missiles that can conduct a top attack, climbing to altitude then plunging down to attack a ships deck.

I do think an Iowa Class would be largely invincible to sea skimming ant-ship missiles and that kind of thing. But a top-attack missile would knock it out same as any other kind of ship.

and the counterargument I've already made throughout the thread is that, for various reasons, naval gunfire is still an important trait for surface combatants

with strict rules of engagement, modern conflicts rarely go hot outside of visual range, and within that range guns are king

they're also useful for point defense (smaller ones, not battleship guns), finishing wounded vessels, shore bombardment, defense against small craft, etc ect

A modern battleship would carry few if any large caliber guns, but a litany of 5" mount.

Only battleships built before the advent of naval aviation were vulnerable to plunging fire. Post-treaty warships included thicker and thicker deck protection schemes. If the threat to a ship is the deck rather than the belt, you simply have to armor your ship quite differently from when the threat was at the waterline. Keeping in mind that the Iowa had a 1.5" thick main deck, a large "empty" space, and then a 6" citadel deck, what current top attack missile "easily defeats" this?

> what current top attack missile "easily defeats" this

none as there is not single bb in service
name single bb that will defend against modern missile then

Would ERA work on a warship? Would the force of waves hitting it set it off?

>1.5" main deck
Almost any anti-ship missile in service, and I only say 'almost' because I don't personally know the full specs for every AShM that exists.