I just feel like showing off...

[Thumpalumpacus]

The subs were highly effective in WWI.

The battleships were designed as ships of the line, so the only real battleship bettle was the battle of Skagerak. It doesn't exclude iondividual successes, but the weapon system wasnt as effective as strategists thought it would be.

Btw, one of the most cringeworthy moments I got from the history channel is the sinking of Szent Istvan. They use it again and again like the bullshitters they are, reagrdless if it fits the bill. They never used it in their original context though, which tells a lot about the channel.

What's the BS about the Szent Istvan?  I don't really watch the Hysteria Channel, as PT rightly called it. 

And yeah, I read about the motor torpoedoboats when you first linked me to the history of the ship. Totally badass.

As for "the weapon system", I'd say it was an utter failure except in the strategic sense (like nukes, which change your behavior based on fear, rather than the amount of damage they actually do), since the old battleships had a range of something like 18 miles, tops, whereas the new classes of ships were designed to fight battles at ranges more like 25-30 miles... which never happened. Even in the few instances where the battleships engaged one another as ships-of-the-line, it was at much closer range. For instance, in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Hood  opened fire first, at a range of 15 miles (though the Prince of Wales' 14" guns could reach out to 20), and the Bismarck could theoretically hit out to 23 miles with its 15". Part of that is because the British commander knew Hood was vulnerable to plunging fire, and wanted to close rapidly so the trajectories would be flatter.

Side note: In looking up the ranges of the guns, I stumbled across a battle we forgot to mention, the Battle of the North cape, Scharnhorst versus Duke of York. The former was only armed with 11" guns, making her barely a battleship, but she was built as one and simply never got refitted with her 15" intended armament.

If you haven't yet, hunt up and read Soul of the Sword by Robert O'Connell. It's a broad history of weaponry, with the interesting thesis that many weapons aren't really meant for use in war but rather to oversee the enemy. He classes dreadnought battleships in that class of weaponry, similar to the point both of you made above about expense--they were too expensive to risk lightly, but massive fleets of them were built to demonstrate national strength.

He classes nukes similarly, for obvious reasons.