Back in World War II, some battleships had incredibly thick armor in some places (I think 14 inches was the thickest from what I read). In the high-tech battlefield, it seems like navies put more emphasis on point-defense systems. But I can’t imagine anybody totally abandoning the risk of receiving enemy missile fire.
Do they still put armor on warships? I imagine if they did, it would have to be extremely sophisticated/strong, because I have seen navy footage testing anti-ship missiles (I believe it was a Harpoon missile being tested) and the missile blew the target ship in half :eek:
The destructive force was rather terrifying. The missile pretty much went straight through the hull of the ship, in one end and halfway out the other before exploding. Is it even possible to design armor to stop it?
Guess we better get cracking on figuring out ways to make Star Trek type shields to work…
Battleships had to be heavily armored (up to 19 inches in the last ones) to stop the 2700-pound armor-piercing shells they were lobbing at each other; 1940’s technology didn’t have any way to defend against that kind of thing except to take the hits and keep hitting back. The problem was, all that specially tempered steel was heavy and expensive – several carriers could be built in the same time and expense it took to build a battleship. Also, the more you weigh, the slower you go.
Modern ships don’t have any armor at all – the hulls are mostly only as thick as they have to be for structural integrity, and some of the superstructures are even made of aluminum, to save weight. Now, ships rely on computer-controlled radar-guided defensive weapons to shoot down incoming threats before they get close enough to hurt, and a honeycomb-like arrangement of interior walls to absorb the blast if something does get through. The benefit of this system is that it’s cheaper and the ships are easier to build, and can go faster.
An Iowa-class battleship could probably shrug off a few Harpoons (more than a modern ship of the same size could, anyway). The degree to which the last battleships were overbuilt (to protect against guns of the same size as the ones they carried) is amazing. Here’s a page about the armor. Battleships didn’t become obsolete because they were easy for aircraft to kill – every battleship sunk by aircraft* survived far longer than any other ship would’ve – but because carriers were cheaper to build, did the job tolerably well, and were the sexy new thing. That last is why a lot of ugly old equipment that does its job perfectly is replaced by sleek, fast new things that aren’t quite as good. The Marines are still bitching about losing the artillery support that the battleships provided.
*Pearl Harbor doesn’t count; they were undefended. Battleships were bristling with antiaircraft guns; after over-the-horizon aircraft warfare made them obsolete for shooting at other ships, the battleships went along with the carriers to provide antiaircraft fire.
I’m sure someone can come up with some better answers than these, but I’ll start off.
Modern warships do have armour - but not anywhere near as much as they used to. Reason? As you said, modern surface-to-surface missles are so destructive as to be almost impossible to defend against by using passive armour, so the weight saved by not installing it is more effectively employed by making the ship faster, more manouvreable and by installing active defences like radars, anti-missile-missle systems, fire control computers, point-defence guns, decoys, chaff/flare launchers. You also take more care to install more effective damage control.
70’s warships used a lot of aluminium in their superstructures to save on topside weight but British experience in the Falklands and American experience in the Persian Gulf showed these materials to be too susceptible to catastrophic failure. More recent designs use a lot of steel and kevlar to defend against small caliber projectiles and to be more likely to survive a missile hit, rather than burn to the waterline and explode like aluminium ships.
I edit too much and don’t proofread enough. :smack: Please ignore the extra “because” in that last bit. In fact, feel free to ignore the whole last paragraph mini-rant.
Ships today dont’ face the same threats they did in WWII, in fact that was the beginning of a different kind of warefare that ended the supremacy of the battleship. Less than six months into the war with Japan the battle of the coral sea was the first major navy engagement where the opposing sides never sighted each other. More sohpisticated weapons, starting with airplanes, require more sophisticated defenses as thick armor can be too easily defeated.
My ships (DDGs, if you want to know) are built without armor intended to protect against missile hits. Every effort is made to reduce RADAR cross section, electronic and thermal signature, light exposure, and excess noise. These are very stealthy ships, and hard to hit. In addition to that, there are several anti-missile defences.
Enough armor to be useful against a ship-killing missile would very negatively effect ship performance and cost.
Also, note that if a threat is close enough to you for small arms fire, you have let it get waaaay too close (other than, perhaps, in port). I don’t know if armor intended to stop small arms fire is being installed, not my discipline; but I’d be surprised.
One thing to remember about battleships is that they were the ultimate evolution of the ships of the line of the 17th century forward. With the exception of technological improvements such as turrets and engines, the tactical concepts weren’t all that different- you still wanted to cross the enemy’s T, and you still expected to slug it out in a fleet action.
Coral Sea and Midway changed that tactical paradigm pretty dramatically.
Today’s naval warfare is probably more similar to the 1945 Okinawa battle with the kamikazes, except that autonomous missiles take the place of manned aircraft. To that end, most naval vessels are stealthy and have a reasonable capability in AA weapons, such as RAM, Sea Sparrow, and Phalanx. And, probably more important, they have extensive EW suites that can jam/interfere with enemy radar and missile guidance systems. In short, they’re trying not to be hit, instead of expecting to get hit, so armor would be superfluous for the most part.
I can only go off what I’ve read and what I’ve been told - but I’ve got a few cites here about the Arleigh Burke Class that indicate they have two layers of steel armour, 70 tons of kevlar armour and the only aluminium in the superstructure are the exhaust funnels.
I said they protect against small caliber projectiles - not small arms fire. I meant small caliber 20-130 mm. Sorry for not making that clear.
Don’t know about the Kevlar. Never seen it, but it could be installed late in the game. I can’t speak in any detail here, but we are not talking about an armored hull. I suggest you look at photos from USS Cole.
Side note: when that event occurred, we were all told that photographs of the damage were “battle damage photographs”, and therefore classified. Of course, we all got them from the world wide web…
This was an issue when the USS Starke was hit by an Iraqi missle a few years back and when another missle (also an Exocet, a French made missle) launched by the Argintinian airforce sank the British destroyer HMS Sheffield in the 1980’s. Many at the time said that those missles striking a battleship like the Iowa or New Jersey would have probably prompted a call to sweep the decks rather than to man battlestations.
What kind of warheads are in anti-ship missiles? Are they designed to be armour piercing like HEAT warheads, or are they just designed to make a really big boom? How effective would it be to put something like Chobham armour in the side of the ship, with ceramic plates and such to absorb impacts?
What’s the difference between a layer of steel and a layer of steel armor? My understanding was that the simplest form of armor is just to add an additional layer of material. You can get more complicated structurally if you want, I suppose…
Also, why would anyone want to armor the superstructure of a ship but not the hull? Seems shortsighted…
Well, if any layer of metal is armor, then you could say my Honda Civic is fully armored…but that’d just be silly. I’d imagine there are factors in play such as the hardening of the metal, the angle it’s installed, how it’s attached to the rest of the ship, etc. I can easily imagine a ship being constructed with a double hull simply to make it a bit more resistant to sinking if it runs aground, hits debris, etc. But it’s not really armor in this context; it isn’t designed to resist weapon attacks.
From the site that Gunslinger linked to:
“…the United States could produce 75,000,000 tons of steel per a year. This may seem like plenty, however the United States ability to produce armor, given the special manufacturing and testing procedures, meant the steel mills could only produce 19,000 tons of armor per year.”
So there’s apparently a rather specific difference in materials, as well, but I’m no metallurgist so I can’t speak to that.
I am speculating, but instead of armoring ships with thicker hulls, and superstructures capable of withstanding missle strikes, would it not be more feasable to armor the hulls with reactive armor? It would be lighter than steel, but could defend against harpoon missles and still bigger explosives.
Reactive armor is to expensive for use on most ships. A case might be made for submarines, due to their great importance, and high cost. However, I think that reactive armor is currently limited to the M-1 and a few Bradley’s.
Is the armour designed to give complete anti-penetration protection against smaller calibre projectiles fired from a cannon? Up to a point, yes.
Is the armour designed to give complete anit-penetration protection against a missile attack? No. But it is designed as an element in the passive protection system to help give a crew time enough to fight any fires or, failing that, escape.
Well, in a way, it is. The metal skin of your civic is designed to give protection against intrusion by external projectiles. That fits a pretty broad definition of armour. All that is in argument is the degree of protection.
But even if we narrow the definition to mean
can you tell me what other purpose 70 tons of kevlar armour sandwich between steel plate and placed over and around the Combat Control Spaces (located in the superstructure) serve?
That’s unfair. The problem with battlehips was that they could not longer adequately hit thr enemy and are simply not effective on the attack. And they make awfully expensive floating rocks.
