Rebuild: can you install new armor of modified thickness, but the quality will be like the old armor

[magdeburg]

In the ship file, I found only one parameter related to armor quality - "ArmorMod=", which indicates that the new armor for turrets, upper belt, and secondary guns has the quality of the year when the ship project was created, not the current level of technology. If this is indeed the case, it is extremely disappointing, ahistorical, and senseless. Even in "UA: Dreadnoughts," you can change the type of steel during upgrades, and RTWx are considered deep games. I was willing to accept ahistorical gaming conventions like the inability to change belts or the fact that bulges add 500 tons regardless of displacement, but it's hard to accept such a drawback (also because I now don't trust the game). Am I not right?

UPD (6 min): I will add that I try to adhere to the etiquette that suggests searching for information on the forum before creating a new topic or even asking a question, so I have browsed through all 11 pages of topics and tried to find an answer using the keyword "armor" - but found nothing.

[brygun]

Not in the game

Not really in real life.

Most ship armors are part of the structure or hugely influencing the structure that reducing the armor would be very difficult. This would be needed even in a dockyard remove and replace.

Real life you can add armor and the game does allow adding more deck armor.

What we also don't model in this game is the metacentric center of height. This relates to the ship's stability. Where the bouyancy center of ship is compared to its center of mass. Armor changes would affect this too. New armor of the same will have a somewhat different thickness than as built though probably could be compensated for. Much greater thickness though could be very difficult.

Looking at your original post I would say that UAD is wrong to allow the changing the steel type during upgrades. At the very least it should require a huge expense to not only do so but to hold the ship together while its skeleton was missing.

[pratapon51]

HMS Renown had her entire armor belt removed and replaced with a newer, heavier belt at least once. The Essex-class carriers had all their belts removed for their conversions later in life. There's not much reason we can't do a most-of-the-ship revamp of armor besides cost, especially during a treaty situation; refits in RTW are really constrained compared to RL.

If nothing else, what could be done is to store a few more armor values for values that can be changed after build so they're actually better than the old armor. That said, the difference isn't huge by the time you'd do this, but...

[wlbjork]

It's also a time issue. Stripping the hull back far enough to remove the armour plates is a pretty major undertaking - despite having the armour plates for both HMS Renown and HMS Repulse taken from Eagle (Almirante Cochrane) the reconstructions still cost £860,000 and £890,000 - roughly 1/3rd the original purchase price.

HMS Warspite also had an extensive rebuild (including propulsion and belt armour upgrade) that was probably better described as a reconstruction - at the cost of almost £2,500,000 and taking 3 years to complete - roughly the same timespan and cost as the Renowns were just a decade or two earlier.

It's not entirely unknown to happen - but the above cases were during the time of the three Treaties when it would make more sense to undergo much more extensive reconstruction than otherwise.

As a general guideline, it was too much of an undertaking to remove armour.

[Burningapple3]

Nagato also underwent a refit to add 8 inches of B armor from 2 inches during the London Disarmament Treaty.Nagato is also reinforced in areas other than B armor, such as T armor and D armor.This is a retrofit that adds another layer of armor, not a retrofit that removes old armor and adds new armor.
The fact that such renovations were done in the real world would be useful in a similar situation in the game.It may be systematically difficult to calculate the defenses of multiple armors of different quality.However, I think the game would be even more fun if it were possible to replace armor or add B armor, which is the subject of this thread.

[stele]

While belt armor is mostly locked, turrets can be replaced. At least them should get new armor quality kept in different variable.