A greek Trireme:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme


How many would it take to sink a WWII era battleship like the USS Missouri?

Lets say there's a battleship off the coast of your country and all you got are triremes, but you have an infinite number of them. How many would you need to send?

If you had like 1000 of them, you could surround the battleship and light them all on fire and create a ring of death that would hopefully bake everyone inside the metal ship alive.  Other than that your best bet might to just surround the thing and immobilize it until everyone starves to death.  I am having trouble seeing them actually bringing them down, but that may just be frustration carried over from Civ II when it seemed like those stupid things would kill my battleships all the time and I used rage over the implausibility of the whole situation

Assuming their a little bit later triremes and that they had solid artillery capability, that ~40 of them could completely encircle a battleship, and that the battle ship could not move.

The USS Missouri had 327 (all combat rained) crew members.

A typical trireme has ~16 fighters and ~200 oarsmen and crew.

Lets say a trained Greek Hoplite could beat an american soldier hand to hand everytime.

Then lets say that, after being boarded, the american soldier can kill about 12 greeks at long range, and ~6 at medium range before the greek gets close enough to spear em. (due to guns)

Now I figure a battleship, being completely surrounded, could probably take out 40 triremes an hour as they approach.

The greeks, being infinite will definately approach from all sides in a circle. And would definately have to board the ship in order to take it over.

327 crew X 18 long range deaths = 5886 Greek soldiers need to set foot on the ship. (368 triremes)

If 50 triremes could completely surround a battleship and it's taking out 40 ships an hour that's 160 greeks getting to the ship per hour.

So 36.8 hours of constant ship bombardment will get the Battleship crew to the last man.

So that's 1840 triremes.

I would send 1840 triremes to take over the USS Missouri.

(It's the 368,000 oarsmen I'd have trouble finding!)

How did those tiremes manage to surround that battleship?  Or are we talking about a battleship that has no engines?

Had to assume he thing couldn't move. If it could, no number of trirmes could even catch it! Forget board it.

Is this the premise of Michael Bay's version of Battleship?

RiskyBack wrote:

Is this the premise of Michael Bay's version of Battleship?

now that there is funny.

ratsy wrote:

Now I figure a battleship, being completely surrounded, could probably take out 40 triremes an hour as they approach.

That seems remarkably low for the firepower of a battleship?

Aiken Drumn wrote:

ratsy wrote:

Now I figure a battleship, being completely surrounded, could probably take out 40 triremes an hour as they approach.

That seems remarkably low for the firepower of a battleship?

..and that might not even include the ones the battleship could destroy from ramming.

From the wikipedia article on Iowa class battleships:

The primary guns used on these battleships are the nine 16-inch (406 mm) / 50-caliber Mark 7 naval guns. These guns fire explosive– and armor-piercing shells, and can fire a 16-inch (410 mm) shell approximately 23.4 nautical miles (40 km).^[27][28]. The maximum firing rate for each gun is two rounds per minute.

So they can fire 18 rounds a minute.  Sounds to me like a lot more than 40 triremes an hour could be eliminated.

My guess is you would need to throw triremes at the battleship until it ran out of ammo.  At that point the sea around the battleship would be so clogged with debris, triremes probably couldn't even navigate it.