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Well if you're going nuke, and eating the huge costs to build a handful of BBs, then why not go all out & use railguns? They provide far more range (and velocity) potential than conventional "gas expansion" propulsion methods, and you don't have to deal with dangerous propellants.
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Rail guns are the biggest reason I developed the Advanced Battleship in the first place. However they have not been perfected by any means yet, and lack the capability to fire larger weapons. Currently the conctact plates corrode under stress making them useless for a weapon. However this will be fixed in time.
I think liquid hydrogen is a good cantdiate if cyrogenic equipment could be used. And theres other propellants that are promising as well. If using a solid, I think c4 is a alternative, but it will never have the performance of liquid.
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I'm thinking a ship with two or three fixed, forward-pointing railguns running much of the ship's length, at an 'optimal' elevation.
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Maybe aim to sling a few hundred to a thousand pound projectile out to 5-700nm or more.
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Eventually yes, but currently they can't fire a 5 kg shot far enough to be effective. Sure they go Mach 9+ when fired, but the distance here is the kicker. The problem again being corrosion on the rails contact plates.
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It might even be relatively easy to support a range of projectile sizes for different targets, on the fly.
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Absolutely.
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Running it the length of the ship would allow you to lower the absolute max G's and power output required.
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Thats a good idea.
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One might argue that a fixed-forward mount means you'd have to point the ship at the target, but we're talking guided rounds here, so you really only have to point in the general direction. The ship could cruise in a racetrack pattern, a hundred or more miles offshore - slow towards the target for station keeping and sprinting back out when it got too close.
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You should post details on that because I don't quite understand what why or what it's doing.
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Given nuclear power, and relatively simple mechanical components, I imagine a twin-barreled railgun of this type could produce a rather high ROF. It'd be constrained by the cooling system and power transfer electronics.
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You are absolutely correct. Rail guns can fire upwards of a 10,000 rounds a minute if you use what I call a box gun. What it looks like is a MRLS except it fires stacked rounds through the rail drivers. It's a rail gun, except really it's a bunch of rail guns all installed into one mount.
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Also, as a general question, if you have a ship who's primary weapons are 300+nm guns, then why bother heavily armoring it? With that range, it can stand off at considerable distances - near NavAir distances - and still deliver fires
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Because a cruise missile like the tomahawk can still go 700+ miles. And accidents do happen. One of the requirements I came up with after reading over current Naval issues is the lack of...defense in ships as far as physically, that as above a single missile can sink a ship of 9,000 tons or more just depending. If a missile gets through then it could sink a billion dollar ship in one hit. The Navy is worried about this, so I developed this as a more obvious solution to the problem.