kev 99
Member
I've already stated it once in this thread; according to D K Brown an Exocet had the armour penetration of a 12inch AP shell.
Future of the Battleship
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And yet, Exocet failed to sink the "Stark", an OHP Frigate. The Exocet that struck Glamorgan was actually deflected upward by the deck combing which is not even ½ inch thick steel. I do admit, I have not read D.K. Browns, "Rebuilding the Royal Navy" but cannot see an Exocet or other missile penetrating the armor. The Iowas have a triple deck - a bomb deck to initiate the bomb, and armor deck to contain and reflect the blast, and a splinter deck to trap and collect any spauling or penetrating shrapnel. The bomb deck was 1.5 inches of STS plate, to cause the bombs to initiate, and most light bombs would simply detonate on the bomb deck. Heavier bombs would detonate in between the decks. Below that is an expansion volume to dissipate the blast, then the armor deck, which was 4.75" of class B armor. The splinter deck was negligible armor, but was there to basically trap an debris falling off the underside of the armor deck
I am reminded of a joke I saw awhile back that goes, "What does the captain of an Iowa-class battleship do after his ship is hit with an Exocet missile? He sends two ratings up on deck. One with a broom and a dustpan; the other with a can of gray paint and a brush."
I am not sure the investment in weight/cost of traditional armour could be justified and I think talk of guns over 155mm is unrealistic, it's just more efficient/less recoil/greater range etc. to do this with: missiles, rockets & aircraft.
But I don't think you could completely rule out the value of a new concept of toughening/protection. If focused on vitals, a radical "all or nothing" around: magazines, VLS, key systems. There are plenty of concepts that have been tried in AFV where there are far more weight restrictions. I am quite coming round to an independent battleship/cruiser idea for a meduim sized navy. Modern ships favour bulky builds which would suit spaced armour, new tougher materials than steel.. Kevlar? I like the idea of a highly flexible ship built round a flexideck/hanger/dock. Thinking of the ballasting of a dock, I remember reading somewhere that HMS Nelson/Rodney has a concealed protection scheme using 2,000t of water, a modern equivilant could be a good defence against hole charges.
Missed your post. I think I would add to this, there are changing definitions on air superiority. The West is appears to be increasingly reluctant to risk manned aircraft at all. The other side might not be able to use airspace themselves but they might be able to deny it to us, or just make it expensive for us, in a limited engagement such as a raid on Iran who may/may not have S300s?it is certainly an interesting question. We assume that all operations in the present and near term will occur with complete air superiority (as they have for the US for the past 50 years?) which doesn't create an uncontested space but truly reduces the risk of casualties.
Will that always be the case though? Let's assume a hypothetical scenario of war with China or Russia strictly for the purposes of illustration. Both have capable air forces and robust anti-air defenses. How long can other operations, including ground forces, wait before air superiority is achieved? What if it isn't in the way the US has enjoyed for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq?
I'm really not trying to be argumentative here, but I am actually puzzled by this question. Will the US concede to make a contested landing, and if not like D-Day or Iwo Jima with machinegun nests and bunkers (and antivehicular missiles in this day and age) then atleast with enemy air forces harrying the landing force and/or mobile ground forces launching a counteroffensive just inland? Or will the US continue the fight at arms length, surgically reducing the enemy war fighting capability and not committing anything to the ground until freedom of movement and control of the skies has been achieved, no matter how long it took?
If the answer is the first, then something survivable that can provide cheap, long-range, accurate, and devastating continuous fire on the enemy would be prudent, whether it was a battleship or not. If the second, then no you don't need battleships except for those bad summer action flicks
I liked the protection scheme of the DDG-1k. Space the cells out around the ship.
However on the exocet i had heard that the Iowa was projected to be able to take 21 hits before it became unable to fight.
And remember If you did buiild a modern graff spee or a Des Moines class it would neversail alone. The days of lone capital ships is over. The fleet or BG rule now. Have sense WW2. The Bismark provides the evidence of this. It was even by WW2 standards a heavy battlecruiser and good for the european theater. But agaisnt a combined taskforce of multiple ships and weapons nearly defensless.
However on the exocet i had heard that the Iowa was projected to be able to take 21 hits before it became unable to fight.
And remember If you did buiild a modern graff spee or a Des Moines class it would neversail alone. The days of lone capital ships is over. The fleet or BG rule now. Have sense WW2. The Bismark provides the evidence of this. It was even by WW2 standards a heavy battlecruiser and good for the european theater. But agaisnt a combined taskforce of multiple ships and weapons nearly defensless.
I think the Iowa was more the battlecruiser and the Bismark was a dated design but a battleship. The Des Moines a very heavy cruiser and the Graff Spee really a merchant raider. The battlecrusier & battleship have limited value and if there was hindsight would not have been built. The point here is has technology (advance air defence and long ranged missiles) made it viable for a new capital ship.
I think so Yes. But people have to stop seeing it as a cruiser and more as a capital ship in its own right.
NO SHIP is capable of operating by itself any more.
And i would argue the simple ability of the Iowa's in a shore bombardment role has proven them to be more than worth the cost in steel and men and treasure.
You’re talking chalk and cheese. When the Exocet was designed (1970s) there were only a handful of ships still in service with armoured belts. So its warhead was a semi armour piercing high explosive job. Designed to knock through a few plates of steel to detonate inside a ship achieving the results explained above.
But if needed this warhead could easily be replaced with a 35cm (14”) diameter shaped charge. Such a warhead would punch through the armoured belt of any battleship. It would also punch a hole through the sides of any un armoured warship and the molten spray of its jet cause havoc in which ever compartment it ended up in. But the net effect of this on a typical destroyer or frigate would be much less than the semi armour piercing HE warhead.
But on a battleship it’s a different story because behind its heavy armour is a huge concentration of explosive propellant bag charges for the ship’s big guns. While a lot of effort is put into avoiding sympathetic explosion of these charges and can sometimes be effective against kinetic penetrators that get through the armour such defences are far less effective to the shaped charge effect. Even an Exocet sized missile with a shaped charge would penetrate battleship armour and if hitting in line with the magazines would ensure complete destruction of severe damage to the battle wagon.
Well they wouldn’t be laughing if they were hit by an Exocet with a shaped charge warhead or anyone of the number of Soviet missiles with similar. They’d be memorialised something along the lines of Admiral Beatty’s comment from Jutland, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” There was a good reason the USN slung two Phalanx CIWS per broadside on the Iowas when they were recommissioned.
But no one would build a repeat Iowa to have a new shore bombardment ship today. The use of New Jersey and later the rest of her class post war for this role is a classic example of reuse (ie pre-loved) vs recycling (scrapping). While expensive to operate the Iowas were cheaper than new build. The USN had a range of plans for around 8-10 new build destroyer sized LFS (landing ship, fire support) in the 60s through to the 80s but never built them. The Iowas were not unique in this role with a number of heavy and light cruisers also being reused and/or rebuilt to keep a shore bombardment capability in the fleet.
I don’t see much doubt as to a shaped charge warhead of sufficient diameter (which the Exocet has) having equal or better penetration than a 12” AP round in monolithic armor. But there are some other questions that must be addressed:
- What happens if the armor is not monolithic?
- What if the outer hull is not the armored bulkhead? Will the outer hull then function as ‘slat armor’ and reduce the shaped charge capability to penetrate the armored bulkhead behind?
- What if there is a broad gap (>1m) between the hull and the armored bulkhead? Will this cause the jet to dissipate before penetrating the main armor?
- What if the gap is filled with a fluid, like water in a ballast tank?
- What are the effects produced behind the armor from the penetration? There is a big difference between the jet from a shaped penetrating into a compartment and the 8kg to 12kg bursting charge of a 12” APHE round detonating inside the compartment and spraying multi-kg shell fragments through the lighter internal walls.
I don’t know of any battleship built with BURLINGTON armour (aka Chobham) arrays.
No and no. Slat armour’s primary effect is to short out the piezoelectric fuse of an RPG. The minimisation of the effect of a shaped charge on armour thanks to non-optimal standoff at detonation (ie pre-detonation) by a standoff layer (which can be a slat or a bulkhead) is related to the nature of the jet which is itself related to the diameter of the warhead (and other things). Basically the bigger the warhead the bigger the distance of pre-detonation has to be to counter the effect. All this does is reduce the effectiveness of the penetration jet.
To defeat an anti-ship sized shaped charge warhead which ranges from a small Exocet through to a large Mistel or STYX sized warhead you are going to need some very big slats... Those battleships with internal armoured belts are unlikely to garner any kind of noticeable advantage against these big warheads because the layers are not of a large enough standoff distance.
Ballast tanks tend to be located at the bottom of the hull and even if they were in the penetration path would probably actually make things easier because the jet would stay more contained and not be dissipated by travelling though air.
Well only a few armour penetrating exploding shells actually fused after knocking their way through armour. The advantage of the shaped charge jet is the molten metal is sprayed in all directions into the charge filled compartment as a natural product of armour penetration. It doesn’t require successful fusing. Also the nature of an exploding shell is it can only impact on the immediate layer around it and can be contained and ablated whereas the jet sprays over a wider surface area. Also the size of a jet from a 500-5,000 lb shaped charge is quite considerable compared to the rather limited splinter effect from very casing heavy APHE rounds.
But it’s neither a here nor there really. A battleship with a heavy round detonating inside its magazines tends to be done for (eg HMS Hood) just like one with a shaped charge punching into the magazine would be as well.
And hey, it's true that there's not a lot of current anti ship missiles that can get too far into a battleship main belt - but you could fit one a missile out accordingly a lot more quickly than you could a battleship.
One pass with a single Tornado or similar and a dozen Brimstone would mission kill the turrets, end of platform.
One pass with a single Tornado or similar and a dozen Brimstone would mission kill the turrets, end of platform.
Heavy weight torpedos can kill anything that floats no matter how well armoured. My wife took me to see "Battleship" as a surprise because she thought with my interest in defence I would enjoy it. The thing that kept running through my mind was that an SSN or SSG with heavy weights would have made for a very short slightly more interesting movie as it blew the alien fleet back into orbit before they even knew they were under attack.
fretburner
Banned Member
In that movie, the force field was supposed to down to several hundred (or thousand) feet below sea level as well. So I think the subs will not be able to dive deep enough to attack the alien ships.
Regarding battleship armor, I read a document that there was already a successor to the Iowa-class battleship with armor that's supposed to withstand 16-in armor-piercing shells. I don't know how you can do it, but apparently, plans did exist on a battleship of this class. It's got 4 turrets too for a total of 12 16-inch guns vs the Iowa's 9 main guns.
kev 99
Member
That would have been the Montana class.
The heavyweight torpedo kill is such a no brainer I didn't think it needed restating.
I'll catch BattleShip when it's on cable and I've a half bottle of wine in me to buffer the pain as it looks to be *awful*.
The battleship argument always runs like this:
"Nothing can get through all that armour"
"Ah but..<insert incredibly long list of weapons that can>"
"..well...*obviously* we'd be right next to an AWD so you'd never get close enough.."
"So, why do you need the armour?"
The USS Worden incident when to two AGM-45 Shrike anti-radiation dropped by accident, crippled the ships sensors is another example.
I think the debate is around a new build, mention of the Iowa class & 16" guns is a bit far fetched. It's more in a modern Kirov space. Probably less likely to have an AWD present as it would have the fit itself and mounted a lot higher up?
Cheap shot. I said nothing about Burlington/Chobham, ceramics, etc. Monolithic is defined as ‘all of one piece’. I suppose if I had said homogeous instead you would have chided me for ignoring the fact that battleship armor was face hardened.
I was referring to the spaced armor effect created by the multiple layers of bulkheads, which should have been obvious from the sub paragraphs, which could causes the warhead to detonate at a non-optimal distance from the main armored belt.
Slat armor is just a lighter weight version of spaced armor, I probably should have used that term instead, to reduce your confusion. But your reference to ‘you are going to need some very big slats’ would indicated a deliberate attempt at being obtuse.
How big of a gap would you think is needed to reduce the penetration by 50%, for example.
Just the mass of the water alone would make a meter of water equivalent to 12.5cm (5”) of additional armor vs. the shape charge jet. Moreover, the steam expansion would tend to break up the jet, similar to (though less effective, but you are traversing a much greater thickness of water) reactive armor.
Has anyone ever built a 5000 lb shaped charge? A more realistic range would be 250 lb to 2000 lb for missiles, though nobody may have built a 2000 lb’er either. Besides, above a certain size for a given cone configuration, the diameter of a shaped charge is the determining factor for penetration, not the weight of explosive behinds it. And the shaped charge jet does not spray over a wide area, most of that is material broken off the inside of the armor.
Fuses don’t always work, particularly the older designs, but modern fuses are about equally reliable for shaped charge and APHE rounds.
Agreed. Though I understand that it is far more likely if you hit the propellant magazine than the shell magazine.
A major advantage shaped charges have over APHE would be that shaped charges are equally effective against lightly armored combatants. APHE tends to punch through without detonating.
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