Cool discussion- It's very interesting and informative. This is slightly off topic, but I feel it's relevant and interesting to think about. Military history and what is considered obsolete/the progression of innovation, etc, has always been an intriguing concept for me. I wish I could find the quote my professor shared to make sure I get it right, but it was
something like this: (Its been 10 years so I remember the lesson but not the words)
"For everything we know of history, and for all the vastness that it encompasses, the most harrowing truth a historian comes to learn stems from sleepless nights contemplating the even greater expanse representing the spaces in between- where no knowledge of what occurred or what could have been will ever exist again, but remains forever lost to the inertia of time and the volatility and ego of humanity."
This applies more and more the further back you go, and it has been theorized that even the technology of today could be improved by ancient civilizations' knowledge that was never recorded or lost in war or catastrophic civilization collapse. In this era, it's the opposite. There is
so much recorded that it's hard to sift through the data.... which is why Big Data management is so important right now.
To apply this to warships, it's important in my mind to note that much about what we think of as being obsolete stems from what
worked in the moment. Using WWII as an example, if something would have caused a situation where a battleship squadron cornered and killed all the carriers in a fleet then proceeded to win the sea war, we would still likely be in a battleship arms race and carriers would have been tossed aside as a "bad and costly idea" and not developed further- theory crafting be damned. This does not actually make carriers the weaker warship, per say, but that impression could have certainly killed the desire to continue innovating them under the right circumstances. Maybe it would have been picked up again later.. or maybe not.
Mostly, this makes sense from a psychological viewpoint. Someone isn't going to spend the costly time and resources building something again if it performed poorly during its initial test in the field. You probably won't be this guy:
If something works in the moment- especially if it works very well, it becomes an arms race on who can innovate and improve it faster. Similarly, due the importance of defense, technology often changes at a rate that many military strategists can't keep up with. The decade in between WWI and WWII showcases the dangers of relying on old strategies/tools. Even in WWI, the machine gun was something the military minds at the time often just didn't know how to handle because it was new and unprecedented in its destructive capability- which caused defensive trench warfare, etc.
I think the arms race situation and how innovations change what is and is not viewed as viable can be simplified to offense and defense. If you can't stop the offense and the defense is ineffectual, the tool won't likely work. But if you develop a better defense that stops the best of their offense- you win. Though simple of the surface, the typical speed (and the fact that these are obviously hidden if possible) of innovations make this judgement call very difficult to make, and oftentimes therefore the best evidence is what worked in the past. This means that innovations that could actually be better than the current meta of military understanding
can be lost due to that special moment in history another teacher described as: "Sometimes... *** just happens." (He was describing William III's death for anyone curious.) You don't really get a lot of tests with warships since as it has been mentioned already most sea wars come down to a few decisive battles after a lot of tactical posturing and attempted resource denial. So new innovations often get a very limited opportunity to prove themselves in actual combat. If something unexpected goes wrong it can kill the confidence in the innovation completely regardless of how well it could perform when optimized or under differing conditions.
If they had discovered a lighter, stronger way to make a knight's suit of armor resistant to the crossbow and longbow, those weapons could possibly be an afterthought in history. Agincourt remains a testament to the longbow still, though. Even then, there were many other factors such as muddy terrain which slowed the knights charge, etc. Had that battle not occurred or gone differently (everyone at the time expected the French to easily annihilate the English due to their numbers), the longbow could have been abandoned (armor costs way more but was also a status symbol so it served two roles, and training archers on the longbow was reportedly
extremely time intensive- iirc a decade or more to hone the skills and build the arm strength to be effective with it so its widespread yearlong practice was encouraged among civilian populations to make recruitment easier), so it had its drawbacks as well.
I'd be really curious to see what kind of ship would be made today if the rule was still "bigger- more guns- better guns." Dreadnoughts likely would be a designation all on it's own, and the designation of battleship might be more like the cruiser designation of today. Or the designations of today would apply but everything would be bigger. It's fun to speculate!
For a book series of crazy alternate history that does a good job of describing an innovative arms race, the
Destroyermen Series is pretty interesting.
