There is… a lot wrong here. Europeans did envision shell rooms as added protection before a shell could theoretically hit the magazines. The reason pre-Jutland British ships had shell rooms below the magazines was because it was envisioned that mines would be the greater threat, for it was believed that it would be unlikely that a shell can penetrate that deep inside a ship. Once the lessons of Jutland was absorbed they took that lesson to heart and every battleship after the admiral class had shell rooms above the magazines.
Side note, the other issue here is that the US Navy uses very stable explosives compared to everyone else. They were very paranoid on the saftey value of anything flammable, this is why they were uninterested in the more energetic Cordite and Lyydite despite potential performance advantages.
As for armor, thats literally the definition of immune zones? Like, what are you trying to get here? It reads like you’re trying to say that the american system was flawed despite everyone else coming to the same conclusion. Every other navy develops their armor scheme in the premise of ‘protecting from its own guns as far as possible’ because that was the most efficient.
The only reason Bismarks and Scharnhorst armor schemes work in War Thunder is because it doesnt model any of its flaws.
Well US Navy is not the only one doing that. Yamato class had barbette shell rooms too. The Royal Navy never apply barbette shell rooms on their battleships but it was applied on the rapid firing 6" DP guns mounted on the proposed Minotaur and the actually built Tiger class.
Interestingly though, the barbette armour of the UK 6" DP is merely 25mm, technically splinter proof only. If the shell storage inside the barbette was supposed to be that dangerous it would have been offered with armour that matches the level of the citadel, rather than splinter proof plates.
What is true is US Navy was the only one that apply barbette shell room on everything from cruisers, and such layout wasn’t untested by real battle damage, such as the one I mentioned earlier, the USS Savannah that had her shell room directly crushed by Fritz X without any shell in the storage exploding. Bear in mind the light cruiser’s shells are much weaker in terms of toughness so you would only expect battleship shells to be even more inert than that.
And I don’t think anyone here is arguing that shell room should pose absolute no danger. The situation being the shell rooms on standard battleships now work as an almost 100% insta kill which is entirely unrealistic and also problematic even solely on a gameplay perspective. They could have made them to be consistent to other ships in the game (non lethal detonation) or ideally reconsider the shell room behaviour in game like making them a source of fire danger rather than explosion.
queen mary almost sank after at the start of the battle of jutland when a round from 11 inch guns of sms vonderton smashed into her magzines starting a fire which spread down the the turret basket because the blast doors where left open to quicken the reload it got easy access only surving due to the top if the turret blowing off acting as a pressure release valve
Actually not. Royal navy ships were designed under the doctrine that ‘even if we get penetrated, we have to evade citadel hit’ as they were short of shipyard at wartime and each capital ships were valuable for Royal Navy, who has to cover vast oceans.
Yeah, and Yamato class was another ‘compact’ ship for such armament and armor
Well, I think at least one in above does. I’m also one that shell room detonation should be replaced with percentage lost of shell and fire started, or shell room should be divided into multiple racks so not every shells in shell room diminishes at once. But weak point is weak point. I’m very hating people who saids ‘America did it so it is the best way and other ways are primitive ways’
The fact that German battleships had a different armour (incremental armour with a turtleback) design to American and British (all or nothing) is not a flaw of German armour design. The fact is, the effectiveness of all or nothing armour schemes was never truly tested in battle so any advantages that it has a mostly theoretical. As for turtleback armour, it’s less effective at long range and more effective at short range, which is an advantage in War Thunder as most ship combat happens at around 9-13 km.
Isn’t it rather well known that distributed/incremental armor does not leave sufficient reserve buoyancy for the ship if a large part of it is flooded, while All or Nothing is proven to be capable of literally keeping the ship afloat so long as the citadel is intact and watertight?
I mean, look at USS Pittsburgh. Her entire bow fell off and she still floated. If that’s not proven, then you show me what “proven” means to you.
Reserve boyancy is not some golden goose of ship stability, it’s necessity changes depending on the design of the ship. In many ships, German battleships included, the bow does not contribute that much to boyancy. Gneisenau had a hole punched clean through her bow by a torpedo and had no problem maintaining boyancy. Likewise when Tirpitz was hit with a tallboy on her bow.
I’ve nothing to add on this topic other than agreeing in all fronts, but a five cannon refit Porter class destroyer is in game & heh is an even ship, see USS Phelps DD-360 (looks to be in the same modification).
Also the picture of USS Selfridge DD-357 post Battle of Vella Lavella with the bow cut off & the blown to pieces dual 5"/38 mount sagging down over the emptiness is nuts.
The flaw of German armour design was not that they had too much buoyancy associated with the unarmoured area, but their main armour deck (turtleback) was far too low and become entirely below the waterline at full load conditions. Elementary ship knowledge: reserve buoyancy = the volume of watertighted space over the waterline. That means the ship’s citadel does NOT contain any effective volume of reserve buoyancy so the turtle back armour becomes entirely useless on this purpose, consequently the ship can be sunk without having the turtleback penetrated (penetration of the main belt is still required ofc), which is exactly what happened to Bismarck in her final battle.
This diagram gives you a clear picture how this works. In all ships but Bismarck citadel contains space over the waterline that becomes the effective volume contributing to reserve buoyancy:
Metacentric height is a factor contribute to the ship’s stability but not the overall ability to sustain loss of buoyancy. In addition, the stability of the ship can be also affected by other factors, such as the free surface effect which is further worsen in a turtleback design. Afterall, even if the ship doesn’t capsize, when it does not possess enough buoyancy it would sink regardless from the good old Archimedes principles.
This is already a major flaw in a warship design when you mention about this. Less freeboard in general means less available reserve buoyancy, it is not Bismarck the only ship design to have the problem of sitting too low in water though, but Bismarck is certainly the one of the worst on this list (the other worst would be Scharnhorst, another German design).
The opposite design was KGV which has tremendous volume of reserve buoyancy protected by the citadel.
Extra reserve buoyancy would not have saved Bismarck though. Or Tirpitz. Or Scharnhorst. Bismarck was an outdated design for the war he found himself in sure, but I would not call the shorter freeboard/lower reserve buoyancy a major flaw of the design. Maybe on the face of it, it is, but in no instance was it a significant contributing factor to the sinking of a German battleship. It would be like saying Prince of Wales was sunk because she has an all or nothing armour scheme when really, the armour scheme wouldn’t have made a difference.
Currently, a ship can fix its boilers and gun turrets in under 20 second when in reality would require months of drydock time to fix. The main downside of Bismarks and Scharnhorst protection scheme is the hilarious habbit of a single shell hit disabling half their firepower.
Regardless, Scharnhorst and potentially Bismark should pay for their almost immune citadels to being easy to flood. Its a notable downfall irl and the game doesnt model main turret knockouts as disasterous as it should be. Because you know, a ship that can sail into the middle of the enemy team and not die from the bad play as a bit of gameplay problem
Meanwhile, shell rooms add a completely imaginary flaw thats been disproven multiple times in combat and testing. It makes Standards useless in a gameplay perspective and is singlehandedly killing any hype players had for any US BB addition.
Makes just little sense. You keep bringing the reserve buoyancy story again and again. Not for a single German capital loss this proved to be an issue.
Btw. why was the PoW sunk that fast by a mere hand full of torpedo hits + some bombs when it was so great with that reserve buoyancy thing? While the supposed inferior German desings took dozens of main calibre gun hits and dozens of torpedo hits. Just read the amount of fire Scharnhorst took. Or Bismark. Or Tirpitz. Gneisenau even survived one of these dreaded magazine detonations. Also consider all these torpedo and mine hits Scharnhorst + Gneisenau took during the war. Not a single one caused fatal flooding.
Prince of Wales was sunk with the torpedo equivalent of a golden BB hit. The first torpedo to hit the British battleship hit the stern and bent the shafts, where automatic saftey features turned it off. However, the crew was ordered to restart the shafts without checking the the damage, causing the propeller assembly to spin out of its mounting tearing apart bulkheads.
This as expected caused huge amounts of flooding and cutting off power to all of PoWs mountings sealing her fate
For Christ sake every battleship built in the 1930 had as good or better compartmentalzation than the German built ones. Battleships just arent going to sink rapidly from gun fire alone, Kirishima suffered multiple body blows from US 16" super heavy shells and even she still floated for hours before being forced to evacuate. Flooding is a accumalitive process that German ships are specifically vulnerable to, magic krupp steel compartments or otherwise. This was why Bismark was torpedoed, the Royal Navy was not sticking around for hours to wait for their enemy to sink.
Considering we dont have the tools irl ships and crew had when dealing with ammunition fires such as flooding the magazines I can accept flooding being more lethal than they should be.
