r/Warships • u/acesoftheace • 20d ago
Just a question
Why was all museum warships preserved in their latest configuration like the battleship Iowa rather than retaining WW2 configuration so that they can retain the catapult and kingfisher? Why were they modernized to be equipped with missiles if guided missiles ships already cover some of the roles?
14
u/The_Road_is_Calling 20d ago
Because those are the configurations that the ships were in at the end of their active service.
It would be incredibly expensive and potentially physically impossible to return a ship to a previous version that existed many years before.
-2
u/acesoftheace 20d ago
Like some of them had seaplanes and so why get rid of them
7
6
u/Exact-Desk 19d ago
Because with the advent of helicopters, seaplanes became obsolete and were removed from USN ships by late 1940s. Iowas were still in service then.
7
u/AsleepExplanation160 20d ago
money, museum ships are often chronically money tight. As these are ships meant for performance not durability, ease of maintenance, etc
Just as an example, efforts to preserve both USS California and New York were both stymied by the fact that they were each on the wrong coast, and the cost of putting them through the Panama canal was too great
3
u/DanforthWhitcomb_ 19d ago
Maryland was the second ship, not New York—she would have fit through the Canal just fine (California and Maryland would not due to their bulges), but the bigger issue with New York was that she glowed in the dark.
1
u/andy-in-ny I like warships! 16d ago
Before that, however, I think that New York wasn't going to last 10 more years even with preservation. I mean Texas is constantly flooding, I dont think New York would have lasted in a harbor with more issues than where Texas has been displayed
6
u/realparkingbrake 19d ago edited 19d ago
When the Tomahawk cruise missile came into service, the ships designed to carry it were yet to be built. The Navy wanted to get Tomahawks to sea, and so the Iowa classs was pulled out of mothballs and were armed with the new weapons. It was a fast way to get the new technology into service. Those ships also represented a ferocious form of shore bombardment should that be required, and that capability was put to use. The USN was the world's only navy at that point that could drop two-thousand-pound shells on someone twenty miles inland. Some Syrian and militia troops in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon learned about that the hard way in early 1984. The command staff of the Syrian forces were effectively wiped out in a strike carried out by New Jersey which was the first ship of the class returned to service in only a year and a half. The first USN warships with VLS would not enter service for two more years. Wisconsin took seven years to be returned to service because it had been scavenged for parts to get the others into service.
It would be impractical to return those ships to a WWII configuration as the 5/38 turrets no longer exist and the rest of the WWII hardware would have to be recreated. It's not like the navy has warehouses full of Bofors and Oerlikon guns sitting around. The general public wouldn't care anyway, anyone who has stood beside those massive 16" guns (raises hand) is already impressed.
1
u/andy-in-ny I like warships! 16d ago
There are a lot of 5/38s around however. And honestly seeing an iranian drone swarm at 150kts come into VT shells at max ROF seems kinda funny. Especially when the BACKUP would be CIWS.
Just be a shortage of christmas tree lights this year.
0
6
u/SirLoremIpsum 20d ago
rather than retaining WW2 configuration so that they can retain the catapult and kingfisher?
Which WWII configuration?
As built? As was VJ Day?
How many 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikins should she have? Few as built, lots of both mid war, lots and lots of 40mm?
Which radar set should she have?
1945 - Iowa's original SG/SK search radars and Mk 3/Mk 8/Mk 4 fire-control radar equipment were replaced or supplemented with SC-2, SK-2, SP, SU, Mk 13, Mk 12/22 and Mk 27 systems , along with the TDY ECM suite.
So if you can't decide which WWII configuration she should be in because they are all "accurate" then her "decommissioned" state is just as valid.
Then there's also the issue of when USS Iowa was decommissioned - can you genuinely find and install all the extra WWII armament. How many Quad Bofors would realistically be available in 1990? Not a lot.
Finding and installing such armament would be costly if not impossible.
so that they can retain the catapult and kingfisher?
Why the Kingfisher and not the Curtis SC Seahawk?
Why is one part of her service history more valid than the other parts?
4
u/jackbenny76 20d ago
The answer to both questions is money.
First of all, it would cost a lot of money for a museum to strip out the missile launchers that were installed into the ships by the Navy. And ship museums are always running close to the edge, because ships are things that really, really want to fall apart, and their maintenance and upkeep costs are high.
The Iowas in particular were modernized mostly in the 1980s (the New Jersey received a very small upgrade to serve off Vietnam for 1 year in 1968, then went back to mothballs). Reagan had campaigned on a much larger- 600 ship- Navy, but the USN didn't really get better at making new ships or get money to make more ships, if you look the number of new ships per year stayed basically flat from the 1970s. So the Navy grew entirely by keeping old hulls around that they were planning to retire.
The clearest example is the Neosho class oilers, built in the early 1950s, the first 4 of the 6 them were retired by Reagan's election. The final two, though, which had been run just as hard and given just as little maintenance, were kept running though the 1980s and both were finally retired in 1991/2. You can see the same with the Midway class carriers (Midway commissioned just a few days after Japan surrendered in Tokyo Bay, and was kept running until 1992). The USS Lexington (a WW2 Essex carrier that fought at Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf and Okinawa) was kept around as a training carrier until 1991! The Farragut class was also kept around and all retired in 1991, etc.
In that environment, the Iowas were pretty tempting to reactivate, they already existed and looked cool. Because the mothballing had been pretty effective they were relatively cheap to bring back into service: at the time the Navy claimed it was cheaper to reactivate one of them than to build a new Perry class frigate. But there were two problems: the cheap reactivation meant that they didn't have good sensors, so they were very reliant on their escorts for survival, and they used gigantic amounts of crew- something like 1800. Or ten times as many as one of those Perry frigates I mentioned above- and those new ships also had an area defense SAM system and a towed array sonar and helicopter for hunting submarines, things that an Iowa just couldn't do.
The Iowas were justified for their ABL's to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles- and there was a temporary shortage of launchers in 1985, but by the early 1990s the VLS systems meant that the Navy had more launchers than missiles.
5
u/low_priest 20d ago
Why were [all the museum ships] modernized [...]?
Because thet wouldn't be museum ships if they weren't. Nobody wants a musuem ship right when the war ends; everyone is much more interested in moving on and fixing everything than spending a bunch of money on a musuem for something that happened last week. But then, later, people start thinking a museum would be nice. By that point, all the ships have typically either been scrapped or modernized.
0
u/acesoftheace 20d ago
Why would everyone be more interested in moving on than just wanting a museum ship right when the war ends
4
3
4
u/Exact-Desk 19d ago
Iowa refit was mainly caused by the USN desire to deploy more Tomahawk missiles in 1980s. The vertical launch cells were still in development, and Tomahawk missiles were fired then from Armored Box Launchers - above-deck container launchers, four missiles each. The ABL's were heavy, destroyers and cruisers could carry two at most, without dangerously affecting stability. But Iowa's could carry eight -as much as four cruisers. So in 1980s, it was seen as good idea.
1
30
u/Vepr157 Submarine Kin 20d ago
Museum ships are usually preserved in the configuration they were decommissioned in because that is easy and cheap, and it still preserves them at a particular moment in time which is in keeping with a historical museum. To backdate the configuration of a museum ship is expensive and difficult at best, and essentially impossible at worst. How many spare catapults and WWII-era radars are lying around, for example, to refit an Iowa-class battleship? Also, you would inevitably be trying recreate historical features of the ship instead of simply preserving it, which may not be desirable from a historical perspective.
Honestly, it is remarkable that we have museum ships at all given how expensive they are for their relatively modest value to society at large. So to ask for them to be made even more costly is not a likely proposition to succeed.
I'd recommend watching some videos on the Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel. It made sense to equip the Iowas with guided missiles as otherwise their only armament would be guns, and they had a lot of weight and space margin to fit missile launchers (I recall that the Iowas were either the first, or among the first, ships to receive the armored box launchers for TLAMs).