Battleship with real ships

For forty years the biggest gun afloat decided everything, and every navy that could afford one built one. Then aircraft got good enough to carry a torpedo far out to sea, and the argument was over faster than anyone expected.

A battleship could shoot perhaps twenty miles. A carrier could reach two hundred and did not have to be anywhere near the enemy to do it. By 1945 the largest battleships ever built were being used mainly to shoot at beaches, which is not what they were for.

The last one was laid down before the war ended. Nobody has started another since.

A cruiser was the ship you sent when a destroyer was too small and a battleship was too valuable to risk — big enough to fight alone, cheap enough to send somewhere dangerous. Every serious navy had a row of them. Today almost nobody does.

The missile is why. Once a weapon could be launched from a small hull and still cross the horizon, the reason to build a large one mostly disappeared: a destroyer carries the same missiles and costs far less to run. The name survives in a handful of navies and describes, more or less, a large destroyer.

Navies reuse names deliberately, and some have been carried by a dozen ships across three centuries. A name that was on a famous hull gets given to a new one on purpose; the ship is replaceable and the name is supposed to outlive it.

So there have been several Enterprises, several Repulses, several Ajaxes — and the one that fought at Midway and the one that ran on nuclear reactors are two completely different ships that answer to the same word. Naval histories tell them apart by their class, which is the design they were built to rather than the name painted on them.