Why don't we simply fling our decommissioned warships at our enemies? Are we stupid?

Because they could use a trampoline to fling them back and we’d end up the the biggest game of tennis
- They said why not, they didn’t ask for you to give extra reasons why we should
- And most important of all - and most tragically ironic - our Nation could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the trampoline gap. But our task now is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix a course for the future.
  -JFK
- That's why we have to start flinging them now. Before the Zs close the trampoline gap. Sure they'd fling a few warships back now. I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but it would be minimal casualties. 30 or 40 million tops. Depending on the breaks.
- I'd watch that.
- I'm confused, what's the reason we aren't doing this yet?
  
  We don't have enough NCD on the Senate committee on defense appropriations yet.
  
  Physics, and money.

Damn, that's a high quality simulation. Those tasteful fractures, wonderful.
- Is it? I feel like the ship would basically pancake in on itself at first impact.
  
  Yea the first impact is not pancakey enough. And the second impact is too stone crumbly.
  Also the chain is uncanny.
  But this is still amazing and way better than anything I could do in 100 lifetimes.
  
  Dunno, I haven't catapulted a warship recently but it feels right?
- I can't wait for my parents to ask me if this facebook "attack footage" is real

Ze French had ze right idéa!
- RUN AWAY!

Are we stupid?
Yes
- Are we crazy?
  
  Also yes

I wonder how much energy it would require to fling a warship from, say, NATO lake to Moscow.
- Oh I'm going to do the math on this:
  assuming the warship is being fired from a naval gun of truly massive proportions based on the AGS Mark 5, firing a saboted warship based on the LRLAP ( since they were made for the Zumwalt class and cost a million a round, making them the obvious best choice.)
  And why not, let's also make the warship a Zumwaltz class, for flavor synergy.
  The LRLAP weighd 225lbs and had an effective range of 150km, so thats ~ 100kg at 150km, and it would travel at 825 mps, let's say ours needs to go 800, were in no rush.
  Projectile Mass: A Zumwalt weighs, rounded down, 15,000 long tons, which is 15,240,704 kg Let's say 15,000,000 kilograms. They emptied it, unloaded the ammunition, decommissioned the AGS, so it weighs a little less. Zumwalts are 610 feet long, let's make that 1000 total to account for an aerodynamic sabot and charge, so 300m. The bore length was 378" and the shell 88", so that gives us a ratio of 4.29:1
  Our barrel is 1287m long, let's just say 1200m.
  Saboted Zumwalt: 15,000,000Kg
  Barrel length of gun: 1200m
  Distance: We're gonna park this gun on Gotland, middle of lake NATO. Well need some space, and that's right in the middle. It's 1,168.31 km as the crow flies, so we'll round up to 1200 km.
  So, our 1.2Km long nuclear cannon would send our saboted 15,000,000 ton Zumwalt 1200km @ 800 mps, requiring 1200 Kilotons of energy, rounded up. The boat would be in flight for about 25 minutes.
  My math is quite accurate, please do not double check it.
- at least 3
  
  Not great, not terrible.
- So let’s you want to yeet this over 1000km from a NATO country to Moscow.
  You’d need at least 3000 m/s of velocity to do this (a ton more since this without air resistance).
  A fletcher class destroyer is around 2000 tons.
  So you’d need more than 8 terajoules or 2 kilotons of TNT.
  
  You’d need at least 3000 m/s of velocity to do this (a ton more since this without air resistance).
  Sounds pretty doable with enough boosters and struts. Pretty sure I've flung worse in KSP
- Probably depends entirely on the aerodynamics involved, if we're assuming it's approaching as an aircraft. This is kind of an intermediate range, and it has shitty ballistics, so the energy to just get it off the ground will be dwarfed.
  
  This is NCD, ignoring air resistance or at very minimum using wildly incorrect values is expected
  
  I would say a rock is a better approximation than an aircraft lmao
  
  Remember your college physics: First Rule - we can ignore aerodynamics.
- For these purposes I am, of course, assuming that air resistance doesn't exist. Which would probably increase this answer by a lot.
  Narva bay to Moscow = 713 km Fully loaded Arleigh Burke destroyer displacement = 8,432,800 kg
  v = launch velocity d = horizontal distance = 713000 m θ = angle we're launching the ship at = 45 degrees g = acceleration (from gravity) = 9.81 ms^-1
  Range of a projectile equation:
  d = (v^2 sin(2θ)) / g
  Rearrange to find v:
  dg = v^{2 sin(2θ)
  dg / sin(2θ) = v}2 v = (dg / sin(2θ))^0.5
  Plug our numbers in:
  v = (7130009.81 / sin(245))^{0.5
  v = (6994530 / 1)}0.5 v = 2644.72 ms^-1
  So we need to launch at 2,645 metres per second (9,522 kph, 5,917 mph). To get the energy, we use the kinetic energy equation:
  e = 0.5 m v^{2
  e = 0.5\*8432800\*2644.72}2 e = 29,491,794,808,885.76 joules e = 29.5 terajoules
  For comparison, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with about 60 terajoules of energy. So once you account for air resistance you're probably looking at a nuke of energy.
  
  Honestly that sounds pretty good actually. We get to nuke something AND we get to throw a fucking ship to Moscow
- Nuclear trebuchet

Go play red alert 3 and you can do exactly that. Even better, you can throw the enemies warships at them!
- Oh my god that was so cool. The magnet satellite, eight?
- Sorry but I don't play anything past Red Alert 2
  
  Counterpoint. SPaAaCh!

This is the comically stupid shit I come here for

Constitution weighs 1,900 tons at present day. That's 13.2 more ugga duggas than I calculated. It's frasible. We'll need all the Honest John missiles and 3,000 kg of homegrown tomatoes.
- The Constitution isnt decommissioned you dumb yuppie. Chuck the USS Dolphin at em.

Cause we're not at Warhammer 40k levels of insanity... yet.
- Angry Marines energy
- You mean strategy?

"THIS! IS WHAT HAPPENS... WHEN YOU USE A WARSHIP AS A BASKETBALL!"

The Holdo Maneuver?
- Argh, I'd blocked off that memory. Is it a pout and a sigh? No! ;)

This is hella cool.

USS Constitution is a warship and still listed on the Naval Register. Fling her and the math gets much easier, nerds, get to crunching. She weighs around, what, 400 tons fully ballasted? Imagine the impact of the mainmast, smashing through the roof of that "civilian administration* building we memed about in March 2022, the one with anti aircraft on the roof. ANTI-AIRCRAFT. They're fooked!

Ship propellers are outrageously big and heavy.
Just get them spinning and drop them in like beyblades!

Speedily, in our days

Because they could steal our tech? I'd say fill them with explosives
- New Jersey landing on Zs,in all her glory, is not enough? She needs to be filled with explosives? I'm in awe. The mental image is hard to conjure.

I did not realize Ukraine was kicking Russia's ass this hard holy shit