USS Montana
I was looking at my Facebook page the other day when up popped a note from one of my "friends", stating that Montana is the only state without a namesake ship in the U.S. Navy. Curiosity peaked, I went web surfing in search of the U.S.S. Montana. Turns out there was one, official tag U.S.S. Montana (ACR-13). It was a Tennessee-class cruiser that served as a convoy escort during WWI, and was later renamed The Missoula. Here's a photo:
The U.S.S. Montanan was a cargo ship, sunk by torpedo in August of 1918, during WWI.
Then there werethe U.S.S. Montanas that almost were.
The U.S.S. Montana BB-15 would have been a South Dakota Class battleship. Its keel was laid in 1920, but construction was never completed and the project was scrapped in 1923. This is what it would have looked like:
During WWII, Congress authorized a whole new class of battleships. They would be called the Montana Class, and according to Wikipedia, they "would have been the largest, best protected and most heavily armed battleships put to sea by the United States." The first of the five ships ordered by Congress in 1939 would have been the U.S.S. Montana. Then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which delayed construction of the Montana class ships. The whole class was cancelled in 1943 in favor of the lighter, swifter Iowa-class ships that could escort the new Essex-class aircraft carriers. But the Montana-class battleship would ahve been a beautiful beast. Here's an artist's model:
Finally, there are the U.S.S. Montanas that never were, because they exist only in the Star Trek continuum. Here are the Federation Starships Montana and Montana-A:
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