The Navy Thread

The wreck of the armored cruiser SMS Scharnhorst has been found off the Falkland Islands.

Say, when an armored deck on a warship is said to be "X inches/cm thick", does that mean it's literally X inches/cm thick in total, or does that only refer to the thickness of the armor within that deck's structure (i.e. ignoring any plywood or the like laid on top to form the actual floor upon which people would walk)?

Generally refers to it's armor

Depends on when the ship was built, turn of the 1900s and before it included the wood since that was part of the armor.

After WWI just the armor...

Unless the ship was a carrier then it still counted every thing else.

Seriously Marq if your looking for a clear answer to any thing related to the navy you wont find one, so please like provide us with extra details and context so it is easier to help.

Things like who's navy, the era, and the role of warship go a long way.

Yeah, these things vary so massively across different eras, ship types and classes, countries, and even manufacturers that asking general questions like that isn’t going to get a straight answer.

Even amongst the same eras you're going to find varying definitions and thicknesses.

For example, belt armor vs deck armor vs turret armor vs armor elsewhere.

Then you have armor schemes, some tried to be uniform protection, others went "all or nothing" over the most valuable/vulnerable areas, some did a patchwork of varying thicknesses.

• Chief Eddie Gallagher Is a Distraction From the Navy’s Real Problems
  • From "Fat Leonard" to the USS Zumwalt - saying the Navy has "issues" is like saying that Gordan Ramsey is a stickler for details in the kitchen.

• What Happened To Our Surface Forces?
  • The money quote:

Words fail me.

Why wood decks over metal ones? Was there metal under the wood or was the deck armor further down?

On some older ships the armor was only around the "belt" of the ship, protecting from direct gunfire at close ranges but offering no protection against plunging fire which became more and more of a problem as accuracy and range improved (from a few miles away, the trajectory of a ship's gun gets steeper and steeper, until the shells, often from the biggest guns, are dropping down like bombs). Later as they began to use more armor, the top armor would be buried down inside the ship to protect her most vital spaces, due to weight and balance concerns.

For aircraft carriers, there was also the idea that wooden flight decks were easier to repair, in addition to previously mentioned weight and balance concerns, plus by placing the armor below the hangar deck, you could have a bigger and roomier hangar, which meant the ship could put more planes in the air and make it harder to get hit by the enemy.

Sorry, its mostly battleships I was wondering about I should have clarified. Why did they have wooden decks even though they were among some of the most durably built things on the planet? Was the armor below the wood, or further down? Because I know they had some imense deck armor, and I know a lot of it was in the citidel... but with there monsterous size, I imagine there was actualy some deck armor at deck level.

The Russian Aircraft Carrier Admiral Kuznetsov Is On Fire.

Reports are suggesting upwards of 600 square meters of the ship have burned, six people have been evacuated for injuries, two remain missing.

I suggest once they get the ship put out, just tow her out to sea and give her a burial via P-800 Oniks test.

Edited by MajorTom on Dec 12th 2019 at 5:36:23 AM

Wait, again!?

Did...did it catch on fire before, or am I just thinking of when a crane speared it on its way to the bottom? Or when it was belching smoke constantly? Didn't it hit a bridge at one point?

I kinda have to concur, at this point it seems more like a liability than anything.

Edit: NBC has a report on all the mishaps its dealt with since its deployment to Syria, including the fact that this fire started when trying to repair the damage from the crane.

Edited by AzurePaladin on Dec 12th 2019 at 10:21:32 AM

This is the third time it has started fire in 10 years.

Through this wooden cutout◊ of the CV-41 USS Midway, where would the hangar be?

Behind that blank void spot showing the elevator on the left. Aircraft hangars are internal and post-Yorktown classes of aircraft carrier didn't leave hardly anything exposed to open sea air.

And how wide were the hangars if the carrier class of the same initially carried 100+ aircraft?

Same amount of space.

Airplanes got bigger, the ships didn't get smaller.

^ Ships got bigger too. If you were to run WW 2 era aircraft off a Nimitz today, you'd probably field close to if not at least 200 aircraft per ship. An F-18 for example is at least 150% the dimensions of an F4F Wildcat.

True, but he was asking why a carrier of the same class carried less airplanes.

To which the answer is those airplanes got biger, the hangers didn't change.

Edited by Imca on Jan 5th 2020 at 12:35:06 PM

Okay, a stupid question of hypotheticals, that isn't about the feasibility of said design (I know it was a failure) but one of engineering limits.

If you were to take the design of HMS Furious where it had monstrous single turrets, and apply it to late war battle wagons like Yamato and Iowa, what kind of stupidly sized guns could you conceivably mount?

The thing with huge guns is that eventually you start to get diminishing returns. There’s only so dead you can kill something, eventually the difference in effects on target is essentially academic and you’re just increasing weight for no reason.

Agian, I know this is not a PRACTICAL design, I know it is not the most efficient use of a warship, and that it would fail in combat.

I am just curious in the purely hypothetical "so if you did it any way, how big can you get

From a purely engineering perspective what's the limit.

Edited by Imca on Jan 12th 2020 at 3:15:35 AM

Well for the Iowas' case, the 16 inch guns were the biggest we had in inventory. The ones we built for the proposed Montana class were basically the 16 inch guns on the Iowa. (We had Little David at 36 inches but that was for experiments only.)

It would be an amusing take if somehow the German railway guns like Dora were mounted to a Japanese ship.

Edited by MajorTom on Jan 12th 2020 at 5:16:35 AM

There is no way to tell for sure. The size of the gun is largely dictated by its mounting and equipment needed to run it.

Its not quite an answer, but I've got an image in my head now of a Nelson-class capsizing after firing a salvo of railway guns like the ones Major Tom mentioned.

Presumably, the feasible limit would depend on the beam of the ship, right?