Corrections to the more egregious errors in Mawa's writeup above:

  1. "Modern battleships" is something of a contradiction in terms.
  2. The basic pattern of a steam turbine-powered all-big-gun capital ship was set by HMS Dreadnought in 1906 and was refined until the last few were completed shortly after World War II. Many of the battleships which fought in the second World War in the British, US, Japanese and French navies were designed and built during World War I; some of the opening shots of the war were fired by a German pre-dreadnought battleship, the Schleswig-Holstein against Polish fortifications near Danzig.
  3. The term "battleship" was current from the end of the ironclad era in the late 19th century, although it had been used occasionally a hundred years earlier. The OED offers a range of quotations featuring it from the first decade of the 20th century. (I think that mawa may be correct as regards the usage of the German equivalents Linienschiff and Schlachtschiff, though)
  4. HMS Hood (built 1918) was built as a battlecruiser, not a battleship. She was not particularly innovative, merely slightly bigger than her predecessors.
  5. The failure of the Yamato and Musashi can hardly be disassociated with the general collapse of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the face of overwhelming odds. It is nonetheless true that by that time the battleship in general had become by and large an expensive liability vulnerable to air and submarine attack.
  6. Not quite written off yet: two or three battleships of the USS New Jersey class were dragged out of mothballs and used in a shore bombardment role during the 1991 Gulf War, inter alia as launch platforms for cruise missiles. Then again, it may just be showing my age that I regard 1991 as being more or less the present day.