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Post by conjay810 on Dec 14, 2020 20:40:11 GMT -6
Hello,
I greatly enjoy building all-forward (AB either 2x3x17" or 1x4x17", 1x3x17") "battlecruiser" designs with maximum armor and large caliber guns to exploit massive immunity zones against enemy ships. In the late 1910s-1920s, this enables them to receive dozens of BB-caliber hits with no turret, deck, or belt penetrations. However, despite being AON, my ships nonetheless take insane amounts of flooding damage and speed damage from BE and superstructure hits, and I have had ships actually sink, without suffering a single torpedo hit or citadel penetration, just from accumulated flooding. To me, this would seem to be a violation of the principle of "all-or-nothing" in the first place - their armored raft has not been penetrated. Is this normal game behavior? I really like building "immune" ships, but am increasingly discouraged by this occurring.
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Post by wlbjork on Dec 15, 2020 0:36:46 GMT -6
Have you installed patch 1.24 yet?
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Post by dia on Dec 15, 2020 8:51:50 GMT -6
Hello, I greatly enjoy building all-forward (AB either 2x3x17" or 1x4x17", 1x3x17") "battlecruiser" designs with maximum armor and large caliber guns to exploit massive immunity zones against enemy ships. In the late 1910s-1920s, this enables them to receive dozens of BB-caliber hits with no turret, deck, or belt penetrations. However, despite being AON, my ships nonetheless take insane amounts of flooding damage and speed damage from BE and superstructure hits, and I have had ships actually sink, without suffering a single torpedo hit or citadel penetration, just from accumulated flooding. To me, this would seem to be a violation of the principle of "all-or-nothing" in the first place - their armored raft has not been penetrated. Is this normal game behavior? I really like building "immune" ships, but am increasingly discouraged by this occurring. The AON scheme/armored raft concept is supposedly very poorly implemented to the point where many players only use it for the weight saving benefits and stick to sloped for BBs/BCs if they actually want something to be survivable. |
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Post by rs2excelsior on Dec 15, 2020 9:34:48 GMT -6
From a historical perspective, I wonder if the armored raft concept was ever really tested - i.e. do we have an example of an AoN ship which managed to survive the unarmored sections being completely waterlogged? To me, it sounds like one of those “great in theory, but iffy in practice” ideas.
From a game perspective, AoN reduces or maybe even eliminates the chances of flooding which can’t be stopped by damage control, which is definitely helpful. That said I’ve had success with both AoN and sloped deck armor into the later game.
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Post by williammiller on Dec 15, 2020 10:16:22 GMT -6
Hello, I greatly enjoy building all-forward (AB either 2x3x17" or 1x4x17", 1x3x17") "battlecruiser" designs with maximum armor and large caliber guns to exploit massive immunity zones against enemy ships. In the late 1910s-1920s, this enables them to receive dozens of BB-caliber hits with no turret, deck, or belt penetrations. However, despite being AON, my ships nonetheless take insane amounts of flooding damage and speed damage from BE and superstructure hits, and I have had ships actually sink, without suffering a single torpedo hit or citadel penetration, just from accumulated flooding. To me, this would seem to be a violation of the principle of "all-or-nothing" in the first place - their armored raft has not been penetrated. Is this normal game behavior? I really like building "immune" ships, but am increasingly discouraged by this occurring. Update 1.24 addressed an issue with smaller shells causing excessive flooding on ships with heavy TPS protection- are you using that version or an earlier version? |
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Post by conjay810 on Dec 15, 2020 22:24:51 GMT -6
Hello, I greatly enjoy building all-forward (AB either 2x3x17" or 1x4x17", 1x3x17") "battlecruiser" designs with maximum armor and large caliber guns to exploit massive immunity zones against enemy ships. In the late 1910s-1920s, this enables them to receive dozens of BB-caliber hits with no turret, deck, or belt penetrations. However, despite being AON, my ships nonetheless take insane amounts of flooding damage and speed damage from BE and superstructure hits, and I have had ships actually sink, without suffering a single torpedo hit or citadel penetration, just from accumulated flooding. To me, this would seem to be a violation of the principle of "all-or-nothing" in the first place - their armored raft has not been penetrated. Is this normal game behavior? I really like building "immune" ships, but am increasingly discouraged by this occurring. Update 1.24 addressed an issue with smaller shells causing excessive flooding on ships with heavy TPS protection- are you using that version or an earlier version? My experience came before the patch, so I'll check that out, but if the effect is limited to small-calibre shells, I am finding that the main problem lies in small numbers of 15-16" shells constantly causing massive flooding (ships lose 4+ knots and have to leave the battle-line due to "heavy flooding") from what should be harmless over-penetrations against my BE, DE, and superstructure. I'm generally wondering if such extreme levels of armor (often 18" belt and turrets, 6 inch deck, 8 inch TT) are worth it, either, though I am very uncomfortable with the usual 12" belts, as these can be penetrated by BB weapons at spotting range, making them seemingly pointless - I might as well adopt "nothing or nothing" armor at that point. AI seems to receive belt pen after belt pen from my 17" guns (I saw a AI BC with zero effective protection against my 17" simply waltz away after receiving, from post battle report, 20 hits) with maybe one or two turrets destroyed and little propulsion damage, allowing them to flee easily, while their turret-farms shred BE and superstructure and propulsion with their dozens of hits, though my ships do often manage to limp away from rather extreme poundings of 30+ heavy-caliber hits, albeit very slowly and low in the water haha. |
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Post by rimbecano on Dec 16, 2020 4:56:55 GMT -6
Update 1.24 addressed an issue with smaller shells causing excessive flooding on ships with heavy TPS protection- are you using that version or an earlier version? My experience came before the patch, so I'll check that out, but if the effect is limited to small-calibre shells, I am finding that the main problem lies in small numbers of 15-16" shells constantly causing massive flooding (ships lose 4+ knots and have to leave the battle-line due to "heavy flooding") from what should be harmless over-penetrations against my BE, DE, and superstructure. You should never get heavy (or really any) flooding from superstructure hits (unless there's less than 2" of deck armor in the region that gets hit and you get the "splinters damage hull" event), but just because reserve buoyancy in the citadel prevents the ship from sinking due to DE, BE, or fore/aft hull hits doesn't mean that they're harmless. Ragged bits of metal sticking out below the waterline can create significant drag (and thus slow the ship down), settling in the water due to extra weight from floatation damage gives you more wetted area (and with it, more drag), and water weighs a metric ton per cubic meter, which means that ram pressure through a hole in the side of the ship at 30 knots can collapse bulkheads, meaning that if you're hit forward, it's prudent to slow down until bulkheads aft of flooding compartments have been shored up, which is why ships detach for heavy flooding. I'm not sure if it ever happened (as the armored bulkhead at the front of the citadel would be the least likely bulkhead to be collapsed), but in theory, bulkheads failing under ram pressure could allow flooding forward of the citadel to make its way into the citadel. So if nothing penetrates your citadel in an AON ship, you probably won't sink, but that doesn't guarantee that you'll be going anywhere fast if the front falls off. |
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Post by rs2excelsior on Dec 16, 2020 8:03:24 GMT -6
Yeah, I have seen some pictures of ships which took hits to their unarmored ends. It's less "harmless overpenetration," more "massive gash ripped into the side of the hull." Losing a few knots of speed seems pretty reasonable for that level of damage.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 16, 2020 8:54:12 GMT -6
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alant
Full Member
Posts: 125
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Post by alant on Dec 20, 2020 9:37:41 GMT -6
Stopped using all-forward due to so many "two adjacent turrets" being lost. Since I seldom lose a BB or BC to the AI it is darned hard to evaluate AON and magazine box schemes. Regarding WWII German armor schemes, they were way behind the times in that regard. Mid-1940's I design a 12x16" 30 knot Montana class BB, then remove one turret and jack up the speed for a 9x16" 33 knot BC (Iowa class) using the same armor (AON, Magazine box) I recommend to following reference: Battleship - Design and Development 1905-1945 by Norman Friedman link |
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Post by andrewm on Dec 20, 2020 18:57:46 GMT -6
Apparently Bismarck and Hood did not have AON protection, possibly neither did Scharnhorst Hood certainly did not she was a 1916 design and was pretty much obsolete when completed which is why the British got an exemption for her from the Washington navy treaty but the modern ships under construction had to be scrapped or converted. Not that it made much difference , penetrating hit to a magazine from extreme range and outside the immune zone will sink anything. I understand that German battleship designers pretty much went back to WW1 style designs and all of their completed battleships despite being new designs were scaled up WW1 designs, it shows in several places in their designs. Heavy anti-destroyer armement seperate from their AA armement where as the Modern battleship designs of the US and UK went for a dual purpose secondary battery with an emphasis on AA. It also showed in the traditional armour scheme while everyone else used an AON scheme, so neither Schanrhorst or Bismarck class ships had AON. One suspects Bismarck would have faired poorly against a KGV scaled up to the same size such as the Lion class The H-Class designs also did not use an AON scheme apparently German designers thought that battles would take place at close range and had relativly poor deck protection in their 1939 designs which are what may have been built with a later war start date, this was improved after Scharnhorst proved vulnerable to bombs (2 1000lb AP and 3 500lb HE bombs penetrated her deck and the 1000lbs fortunatly failed to detonate and overpenetrated the ship, it took 4 months to repair her and if those bomb hits had taken during an operational deployment at sea that would have been it for her, Gneisenau fell victim to the same flaw a single bomb wrecked her forward section when she was in dock and she was never repaired , at sea that would have been fatal) |
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Post by dorn on Dec 21, 2020 7:24:55 GMT -6
Apparently Bismarck and Hood did not have AON protection, possibly neither did Scharnhorst Hood certainly did not she was a 1916 design and was pretty much obsolete when completed which is why the British got an exemption for her from the Washington navy treaty but the modern ships under construction had to be scrapped or converted. Not that it made much difference , penetrating hit to a magazine from extreme range and outside the immune zone will sink anything. I understand that German battleship designers pretty much went back to WW1 style designs and all of their completed battleships despite being new designs were scaled up WW1 designs, it shows in several places in their designs. Heavy anti-destroyer armement seperate from their AA armement where as the Modern battleship designs of the US and UK went for a dual purpose secondary battery with an emphasis on AA. It also showed in the traditional armour scheme while everyone else used an AON scheme, so neither Schanrhorst or Bismarck class ships had AON. One suspects Bismarck would have faired poorly against a KGV scaled up to the same size such as the Lion class The H-Class designs also did not use an AON scheme apparently German designers thought that battles would take place at close range and had relativly poor deck protection in their 1939 designs which are what may have been built with a later war start date, this was improved after Scharnhorst proved vulnerable to bombs (2 1000lb AP and 3 500lb HE bombs penetrated her deck and the 1000lbs fortunatly failed to detonate and overpenetrated the ship, it took 4 months to repair her and if those bomb hits had taken during an operational deployment at sea that would have been it for her, Gneisenau fell victim to the same flaw a single bomb wrecked her forward section when she was in dock and she was never repaired , at sea that would have been fatal) There is big difference of point of view when designing Bismarck and other modern battleships such as KGV, US battleships, Littorio class, Richelieu class. Bismarck class design was done with expectation to fight any time of vessel and ability to continue her mission or escape. For such reason this type of ship (practically raider) she needs to have armoured against cruiser shells as much as possible and for that her armour is really excellent. She also was expected to fight in Atlantic so shorter ranges and her armour was done that way. On other hand all remaining battleships were armoured against enemy battleships and usually with longer range and threat from aicraft in mind so AoN is reasonable solution as opposite to Bismarck. This does not make Bismarck armour bad. It is quite similar as British battlecruisers and the battle of Jutland. So all battleships has excellent protection about threats they were supposed to fight, some a little better, some a little worse, but overall all designs were quite good. |
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Post by director on Dec 21, 2020 7:59:56 GMT -6
I think it is more fair to say that Bismarck's design reflected the lack of experience in designing capital ships, as their designers had been effectively out-of-work since about 1915. Bismarck's use of a secondary and tertiary armament shows up a problem that every major navy had - except for the US. The problem is that calibers large enough to stop destroyers (and fight light cruisers) are too slow-firing for good AA work, while good AA calibers are generally considered too light to stop a destroyer. The Royal Navy went through about six designs looking for the 'golden mean' and never really found it - the closest they probably came to a good dual-purpose gun was maybe the 4.5"... people who know more about the Royal Navy than I can jump in and correct me here. The sole power to go full-out on a single caliber was the US with the storied 5"/38 caliber, and they put a lot of work into managing its deficiencies. For example, the short barrel made it good for AA work (faster train) but less accurate against surface targets - and so on and so forth. But the US Navy simply made a decision and bull-dozed through the problems until it had a very good compromise weapon. The British tried a lot of solutions but didn't decide on one and the Germans went with two... It is fair to say that Bismarck's design was inefficient and the same fighting power could have been had on much less tonnage. It has also been said that the Germans tried to cram every sort of new technology into them (like the tempermental and maintenance-heavy high-pressure engines), so a lot of ship systems were not well planned or just broken (like the radar that broke the first time she fired a broadside, or the AA directors that didn't work). One further example is the extremely high-velocity 15" gun, which had a very flat arc, lots of barrel wear and - because of the high velocity - a tendency for the fuses to fail on impact. Her protection scheme was maybe a little antiquated but they had the tonnage and so they used it. Bismarck wasn't particularly hard to stop - comparable to HMS Repulse or the new Prince of Wales, perhaps - just extremely hard to sink once she was mission-killed. The best explanation I've heard of Hood's loss is this one, courtesy of YouTube's resident naval expert Drachinifel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLPeC7LRqIYThe idea of a 15" shell penetrating an engine-room bulkhead below the armor belt and then setting off a secondary magazine sounds bizarre... but it fits with the relative positions of the ships and the time-stamps of observed events. I think this is as close to truth as we may ever get. Had Hood been able to complete her turn, the battle would have been much more equal and Bismarck's 15" shells would have had trouble penetrating her side belt; despite the age of her design she's have done well in a running fight, especially so since Bismarck really could not afford any damage. Hood's great weakness was in her thin deck armor and older gunnery control, which are part of the reason Admiral Holland wanted to get in close. |
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Post by oldpop2000 on Dec 21, 2020 9:56:09 GMT -6
I think it is more fair to say that Bismarck's design reflected the lack of experience in designing capital ships, as their designers had been effectively out-of-work since about 1915. Bismarck's use of a secondary and tertiary armament shows up a problem that every major navy had - except for the US. The problem is that calibers large enough to stop destroyers (and fight light cruisers) are too slow-firing for good AA work, while good AA calibers are generally considered too light to stop a destroyer. The Royal Navy went through about six designs looking for the 'golden mean' and never really found it - the closest they probably came to a good dual-purpose gun was maybe the 4.5"... people who know more about the Royal Navy than I can jump in and correct me here. The sole power to go full-out on a single caliber was the US with the storied 5"/38 caliber, and they put a lot of work into managing its deficiencies. For example, the short barrel made it good for AA work (faster train) but less accurate against surface targets - and so on and so forth. But the US Navy simply made a decision and bull-dozed through the problems until it had a very good compromise weapon. The British tried a lot of solutions but didn't decide on one and the Germans went with two... It is fair to say that Bismarck's design was inefficient and the same fighting power could have been had on much less tonnage. It has also been said that the Germans tried to cram every sort of new technology into them (like the tempermental and maintenance-heavy high-pressure engines), so a lot of ship systems were not well planned or just broken (like the radar that broke the first time she fired a broadside, or the AA directors that didn't work). One further example is the extremely high-velocity 15" gun, which had a very flat arc, lots of barrel wear and - because of the high velocity - a tendency for the fuses to fail on impact. Her protection scheme was maybe a little antiquated but they had the tonnage and so they used it. Bismarck wasn't particularly hard to stop - comparable to HMS Repulse or the new Prince of Wales, perhaps - just extremely hard to sink once she was mission-killed. The best explanation I've heard of Hood's loss is this one, courtesy of YouTube's resident naval expert Drachinifel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLPeC7LRqIYThe idea of a 15" shell penetrating an engine-room bulkhead below the armor belt and then setting off a secondary magazine sounds bizarre... but it fits with the relative positions of the ships and the time-stamps of observed events. I think this is as close to truth as we may ever get. Had Hood been able to complete her turn, the battle would have been much more equal and Bismarck's 15" shells would have had trouble penetrating her side belt; despite the age of her design she's have done well in a running fight, especially so since Bismarck really could not afford any damage. Hood's great weakness was in her thin deck armor and older gunnery control, which are part of the reason Admiral Holland wanted to get in close. Have you seen this article by Bill Jurens, it is pretty complete with drawings. www.navweaps.com/index_inro/INRO_Hood.php |
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Post by director on Dec 21, 2020 19:05:49 GMT -6
I have seen it before, yes. Those graphics appear in Drachinifel's video and as I remember he gives credit in his intro.
However - the proposal in the video offers, I think, a better explanation.
Hood, like all warships traveling at high speed, piled up water near the bow and had a hollow, or trough, just about at the mainmast (this is the phenomenon the Japanese 'wavy' deck line exploited). A shell hitting there would not have been deflected by passing underwater (or by going just a few meters underwater) and could have easily struck the exposed hull below the armor belt. That path could have taken it through the aft bulkhead of the engineering space and into the 4" magazine, or directly into the 4" magazine. An explosion in the propellant there would have partly vented into the engineering space and up through the ventilators by the mainmast - the great towering column of fire. The remaining force of the explosion could have breached the 15" magazine and vaporized the aft section, in the same way that USS Arizona had her bow section vaporized at Pearl Harbor.
It is the entry at the exposed part of the ship's side, below the armor belt, that to my mind adequately answers the question of how the physics of the thing could work.
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