This is dead wrong. Read the history of the Guadalcanal campaign; it was surface ships that carried the day. Aircraft were ineffective at night and are best used in an offensive role, they can't effectively protect ships bringing in troops and supplies.

The only reason gunships look effective in Guadalcanal is we were fighting other gunships. Otherwise we would have lost. It's only dark for half the day.

The answer is "no". People who say submarines are obsolete are the same people who say "stealth doesn't work". They're missing the point. The point is not to be able to sidle up to your enemies without detection and tag their ships with slogans. The point is to gain a tactical advantage by detecting the enemy before he detects you. Detection isn't a yes/no thing - it's all about range.

The Japanese were more invested in the battleship than the USN, wasting their limited resources on two mega battleships that ultimately accomplished nothing,

The reason they built Yamato and Musashi was because they knew they had no way to match American industrial capability and that they would always be outnumbered. So they decided to build ships that could destroy multiple enemy battleships. But remember, the ball got rolling for this in 1934, long before it was obvious battleships were obsolete.

This was always the advantage that the United States Navy had which the Japanese couldn't even dream of duplicating.

At the outset of the war IJN doctrine was to use torpedoes against capital ships. The marriage of radar and analog targeting computers caught them somewhat flatfooted. Not that it mattered, really, since by the start of the war battleships were really only useful for providing shore bombardment and as AA platforms.

It's a pet peeve of mine as well, but it's a small pet.

I don't want it to affect my holy war on the criminal misuse of the apostrophe.

Liquid Oxygen is HEAVY. A nuclear reactor would result in a weight REDUCTION.

Nope. From the wiki page:

Still, the lower thrust-to-weight ratio of nuclear thermal rockets versus chemical rockets (which have thrust-to-weight ratios of 70:1) and the large tanks necessary for liquid hydrogen storage mean that solid-core engines are best used in upper stages where vehicle velocity is already near orbital, in space "tugs" used to take payloads between gravity wells, or in launches from a lower gravity planet, moon or minor planet where the required thrust is lower.

In other words they fill a spot between chemical rockets and ion engines. In the vast majority of cases they either don't have enough TWR and can't compete with chemical rockets or there's enough time to use far more efficient ion engines.

It's kind of silly to talk about "the overall gross lift-off mass" without talking about thrust. From the very same wiki page:

Still, the lower thrust-to-weight ratio of nuclear thermal rockets versus chemical rockets (which have thrust-to-weight ratios of 70:1) and the large tanks necessary for liquid hydrogen storage mean that solid-core engines are best used in upper stages where vehicle velocity is already near orbital, in space "tugs" used to take payloads between gravity wells, or in launches from a lower gravity planet, moon or minor planet where the required thrust is lower.

These things are not going to replace chemical rockets - they're too heavy.

How is this any more than a revisiting of the ancient discredited NERVA/ROVER program which began in 1956 and dragged on to a miserable failed end in 1973?

That's exactly what it is. I think most people here realize that.

This shares the fundamental flaw of all rocket technology: the fact that any rocket has to carry and throw away a vast load of reaction mass. The Saturn V employed a total mass of 2970 tonnes to lift a mere 118 tonnes to LEO. But the actual raw energy needed to lift 118 tonnes to 200 km is E=mgh = 118,000 times 9.81 times 200,000 = 232 GJ, which is the quantity of energy contained in just 5.47 tonnes of gasoline. So the efficiency of the Saturn V was 0.184%, not because it was a "bad" rocket, but because it was a rocket.

Well, until someone comes up with a workable theory for a reactionless drive, we're stuck with reaction mass. But that doesn't mean we're stuck with chemical rockets - if you could accelerate you reaction mass to some nontrivial fraction of the speed of light you wouldn't need very much of it.