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Originally Posted by Defcon 6
the ultimate reasoning behind it is greatly increased ammo capacity. A missile launcher fires, and is then empty. But a gun can be reloaded more easily. Also, a 16" gun turret can fire more ordinance at one time than a missile can carry.
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Huh? After a gun fires its rounds it is empty too!
A huge battleship might be able to carry more ordinance, but if you look at density of shots per cubic m or per ton, I bet a VLS system with TLAMs beats out a 16" gun turret.
Look at a Burke and notice how little deck space is devoted to the VLS cells, and yet it has 96 rounds.
From eyeballing the front two turrets on an Iowa, I figure they take up around 60m x 20-30m of deckspace, or maybe 1200m^2. A single 8-cell Mk41 VLS occupies around 6m^2. So removing the two front turrets & replacing them with Mk41 VLS cells would give you around 1600 cells! An Iowa only carries around 1200 shells total!
Plus, the VLS cells are less than 8m deep, compared to 16" gun turrets, which go amost all the way through the ship.
And you could ripple off all 1600 rounds in ~13 minutes.
Now granted, 1600 TLAMs would be costly, but the point is, those 16" turrets aren't exactly mass or space efficient.