Missile Age: How Does WWII-era Armor Stand-Up?

[blarglol]

So I haven't gotten there yet, but I am curious. You've all heard the arguments in reality that if something like Iowa was engaged by medium SSMs like Harpoons or Russian/Chinese equivalents, she could take a lot of hits. After all, an armor belt meant to duke it out with 16" shellfire is a different beast altogether than any modern ship meant more to avoid being hit at all.

Basically - do you notice that heavily-armored ships built in the 40s are surviving missile hits and remaining afloat and fighting into the 50s/60s?

[cv10]

As the USN, I had a final run of 54,000-ton battleships with 15-belt armor and 5-inch deck armor in the early 1940s. They seemed to shrug off enemy SSMs pretty well in terms of floatation damage. However, I nearly lost several of them to pretty severe fires caused by SSM hits. In one case, I'm pretty sure that getting it into port was the only thing which kept it from burning up completely. Even with damage control special training, I sweated a lot if one of them had a fire break out.

I kept mine, updated with SAMs and SSMs along with a round of engine refits, all the way to 1970.

[t3rm1dor]

Short answer is that not, they do not.

From a limited observation based on a two year late war (1968) were I was going heavily with battleships, belt protection of 13 inches was stopping heavy ssm. However, belt penetration isn't what kills BB but fires , specially from consecutive hits. 11 capital ships were sunk in the war between both sides: 2 from gunfire (after being heavily damage by missiles), 1 from waterline heavy SSM hits which do insane flotation damage amd the rest by fire from missile hits.

This doesn't mean that gun armed ships are useless, as once the initial salvo is over missile usage decreases (although the ai isn't as proactive in the usage of SAMs for anti ship attack, otherwise things would get conplicated).It's just that relaying on armor to shrugg off missiles isn't a good strat. On average BB will survive more missiles than a CA for instance, but there is currently little defense against superstructure fires. The best defense against missiles is to use destroyers as sacrificial lambs to eat up the initial missile salvo.

I think however, that maybe flat on top BB with upper belt armor could maybe work. This scheme is sligthly more weigth efficient than sloped deck and would actually provide protection against superstructure hits that AoN currently lacks.

[blarglol]

Jun 5, 2023 19:44:09 GMT -6 cv10 said:

As the USN, I had a final run of 54,000-ton battleships with 15-belt armor and 5-inch deck armor in the early 1940s. They seemed to shrug off enemy SSMs pretty well in terms of floatation damage. However, I nearly lost several of them to pretty severe fires caused by SSM hits. In one case, I'm pretty sure that getting it into port was the only thing which kept it from burning up completely. Even with damage control special training, I sweated a lot if one of them had a fire break out.

I kept mine, updated with SAMs and SSMs along with a round of engine refits, all the way to 1970.

They say the game treats missiles like large HE shells. It would be interesting to compare the potential blast damage

[corgi]

I haven't had too many missile hits on heavily armored ships, but I think armor hits diminishing returns because of all the fires. Big armored ships can take a lot of missiles, but they can also go down from a couple lucky hits and a destroyer can take several missiles if they don't get lucky.

I think the other thing is that medium caliber autoloaders kill things really fast. Obviously they don't have the range of battleship guns and they can't penetrate battleship armor, but against cruisers they get so many more hits and a battleship shell isn't any more damaging when it hits a part of the ship that doesn't matter.

[abclark]

Jun 6, 2023 6:16:45 GMT -6 blarglol said:

Jun 5, 2023 19:44:09 GMT -6 cv10 said:

As the USN, I had a final run of 54,000-ton battleships with 15-belt armor and 5-inch deck armor in the early 1940s. They seemed to shrug off enemy SSMs pretty well in terms of floatation damage. However, I nearly lost several of them to pretty severe fires caused by SSM hits. In one case, I'm pretty sure that getting it into port was the only thing which kept it from burning up completely. Even with damage control special training, I sweated a lot if one of them had a fire break out.

I kept mine, updated with SAMs and SSMs along with a round of engine refits, all the way to 1970.

They say the game treats missiles like large HE shells. It would be interesting to compare the potential blast damage

Blast damage is probably contributing less to fires than the unburned rocket fuel being strewn about. ISTR that being the culprit for the large fires that often break out after missile hits in real life.

[bthom37]

The fires are absolutely the killers, not the initial hits. Having said that, if you let the enemy dump their SSMs into a sacrificial DD fleet, the big ship can do a lot of work afterwards. Also, the big ships can be prime candidates for early missile conversions with removing a turret. I've rebuilt some ships into carrying 20 heavy SSM + significant SAMs later on, and they can do really well (again, as long as they don't get focus fired early).

[brygun]

IMX the missiles are big on the amount of fires they do. It may be a big HE first hit but they start fires. Multiple missile hits means a high fire already.

Its going to be a lot about your damage control tech in suppressing the fire.