I really don't understand the "role" this ship is supposed to play. It sounds a lot like a WWII style battleship, but those have been made obsolete for a reason - too vulnerable to aircraft, and had they survived that they'd still be too vulnerable to submarine or other missile delivery systems.

 

If we could build this giant ship, we could probably drop tungsten rods from space, which is a theoretical weapon system even harder to defend against - you pretty much have to get out of the way and that isn't easy.

 

Any anti-missile defense system could be overwhelmed, and if this is such a large expensive target than it would be worth the effort to do so. Withstanding a conventional warhead is one thing, a nuclear something else entirely - and if this thing was a super powerful threat it would be a target. Even conventional weapons used to bust bunkers hundreds of feet underground would probably devastate any seaborne vessel, no matter the armor.

 

The best defense against modern day missile technology isn't to have thicker armor, but to have more, smaller vessels spread out so no single hit can fully cripple your responsive force. Aircraft carriers are the largest vessels today, but even if it was feasible I doubt anyone would want to take them all and merge them into a single supercarrier - a single target is more vulnerable and can only be deployed to one area at a time.

 

Other than being super cool, what is the function of this behemoth vessel, and what can it do that a fleet of vessels built with the same sum resources can't?

I think we've given up on establishing exactly why we need a battleship.

It's not specifically a battleship. By the way I found a new armor that will very well suite the Ragnarok. Carbon Nano-Tubes. Recently been experimented with Philip Streich. A 18 year old genius who won the Intel Baby Nobels award for his research on Carbon Nano-Tubes. Supposedly he can make these nano-Tubes extremely strong with small amounts of Nano. Now I have only done very little research on this Carbon Nano. But here is a video of him and his research at Intel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8AtBPpyIRg

 

Amazing. Also applications of Graphene.