Bet it would still be able to kick Irans naval ass.
Any US battleship task force from 1880 to 1914 can EASILY take on and obliterate the few terrorism supporting/funded rogue states in the world today. Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Cuba would be child's play for a fully equipped, fueled, and trained dreadnought battle group. The only thing that would pose somewhat of a threat to the old warhorses would be what passes for "modern" surface to surface missiles fielded by these countries. But these munitions are very shoddily built, wildly inaccurate, the warheads have finicky fuses and a lot of times would be far more dangerous to their own crews than anything on the receiving end. As we saw from Iran's huge attempt at an all out air assault on Israel last month, 99.9% of their shit was intercepted, either by Iron Dome, C-RAM, or fighter jets. Even if they got lucky and scored a hit on one of the old battleships, the damage would be minimal. Meanwhile, the ships' 14 and 16 inch gyroscopically aimed monster cannons would be dealing out 1-2 tons of high explosive and high kinetic obliteration every few minutes. The First Gulf War in 1991 proved that the battleships were still viable even in modern high tech combat. Just a few salvos from the USS Missouri, recommissioned from slumber in 1986, was credited with virtually VANISHING several Iraqi airfields and antiair defense radar centers off the map. Pulverized, turned to atoms. Hours before the M1 Abrams crews fired up their engines and started rolling north. They rolled through a section of land that looked more like the surface of the Moon than any Terran landscape. Such was the work of the Missouri's 16-inchers.
By 1865, starting with the 400-pounder Columbiads that were built by the US Army for seacoast defense, the era of monster artillery had begun. Over the next several decades, guns would be getting even bigger and bigger, but what had to evolve even faster and bigger than these beasts were the support, control, maintenance, and shielding/transport systems behind them. Entire mechanized networks of pulleys, gears, valves, rails, switches, and elevators were constructed to haul and load the massive charges and shells into the guns. They began with steam piston hydraulic power, then steam turbine electric by the late 1880s. Some systems were even entirely automated, with hoppers and open and close gates allowing huge mech arms to select and hoist the ammunition, all controlled by an operator pulling levers in an observation room. This was truly the age of steampunk, and the machines built to service these great guns, the pinnacles of national security in their day, were what paved the way for modern factories, robotics, and precision parts. North Korea and Iran RIGHT NOW do not even have the capability of building an entire functional 1872-1889 Columbiad or Armstrong coastal gun system, complete with steam turbine electric powered mechanized support, operation, and transport, from scratch. All local machining, parts, and labor. They can't.
