Battleship Armour Engineering - Why is naval armour multi-layered?
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- Опубліковано 16 чер 2024
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Today we take a quick look at the underlying engineering reasons as to why naval armour consists of a brittle and a ductile layer instead of one really hard slab of metal.
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:55 - Principles of naval armour
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Pinned post for Q&A :)
Did ships use other material before the metal plating in order to slow down/disrupt the incoming projectile. Something like another ductile material or some form of space armor?
Good stuff. Did you happen to note the amount of glass "spall" being passed through the cardboard backer in test 3? In the wild, the spall would be fast and heavy and able to do a lot of damage to wires, pipes, and carbon-based life forms.
@@tonyennis1787 in the slow motion you can see the glass plate throws a lot of spall back from the impact site, even more went inward. Relatively little if any made it through the combined plate :)
Considering that the most powerful battleship guns ever built, such as the 16”/50, the 15” on the Littorios and of course the Japanese 18.1”, could penetrate most if not all belt armour ever put on a ship at most reasonable battle ranges, exactly how much belt armour of the highest quality naval steel would you need to withstand those kinds of hits?
What sort of armor thickness would the Kirishima have needed to successfully resist the Washington's broadsides at Guadalcanal?
As a mechanical engineer for over 20 years, one thing I've learned is that you never can know enough about metallurgy.
As a fellow mechanical engineer - I fully agree!
Best choice? Just Know; that you don't know 😂
Metallurgy seems to me as one of the most complicated sciences.
It includes so much math, physics, and chemistry.
@@chudleyflusher7132So you're telling me I love metallurgy
@@m8rshall One of my Professors told us that the key to being successful in Engineering is being smart enough to know when you're out of your depth, and humble enough to ask for help.
@@ghost307I think that's true of most sciences, medicine especially
I feel ashamed that I looked at this and thought "damn, only 20 minutes long" shout out to any other engineers who would enjoy a 8 hour seminar on metallurgical composition lol
The difference is those guys are being paid to natter on. Whereas drach is doing this for fun and acknowledges most people are actively resisting the urge to put themselves into a Coma after 2 hours of professor talk
If you really are an engineer then you rather hold your own presentation to the doggies at home;)
Hey, Drach explains it clearer than my Mechanics of Materials Professor
@@totalwar1793do you have a young one or old one? Almost all my materials profs are dinosaurs xD
@@mrsteamie4196 He's in his 50s
I like the idea of showing this practical Hands-On science. I believe it'll be a great learning tool for anybody who is a young Naval enthusiast, who is just found this channel.😊
Not used in warships but some merchant vessels in WW2 which got labelled "plastic armour". After dunkirk it was realised some of the very old ferrys used in the evacuation had been surprising resistant to armour piercing bullets. Upon investigation the protection was found to due to decks being coated in asphalt. Asphalt being fairly hard gravel embedded in fairly soft bitumen. Admiralty wasn't happy with it being considered as amour, but it did get added to many merchant vessels and saved many lives.
Might be interesting to see how pea gravel in tar stood up to BB pellet.
Some steel body armor plates are coated with a substance similar to asphalt in order to "capture" bullet spall as well. Very interesting.
So asphalt is the binding material? Like is it sandwiched in between or more of a coating?.
@@JamesThomas-gg6il the tar is largely in-between the gravel.so on impact a round would alternating between hitting very and soft material. Such Likely to cause considerable deflection of a small round.
The tar would also help support/cushion rear of individual gravel lumpsl, helping the lump bleed off more of the projectiles energy before shattering.
@@stevecummins324 hey makes sense to me. How about sand as a buffer between two layers. Yes it would need a bunch of sand but sand bags work wonders even against full bore rifle rounds. Just an idea, not that any body that makes armor would take advice from an idiot like me.
I recall reading that this was researched by the British, and they found that a composite of Portland stone (very hard bluestone) and a matrix worked very well, and was of course much cheaper and quicker to produce than steel armour. Used on converted merchant carriers among other ships.
Me at 8 minutes in: “ooh is he going to demonstrate glueing cardboard to glass later?”
Me at 15 minutes in: “nailed it!”
I love the practical demonstrations that you do Drach and would love to see more.
Spoiler!!!
Perhaps you mean, "glued it!"
As an engineer (sort of, my work history is all environmental compliance) with a second semester of materials science, I approve of this and look forward to more. Particularly if we can ever really understand what the US was thinking when it was hardening class A armor plate for cruisers to 60-80% of the total thickness.
Whatever it was thinking, US Class A armor at cruiser-grade thicknesses turned out to be the best armor in the world (along with Italian cruiser armor) against 6” and 8” shells in post-war tests. (And I haven’t ever heard anything about an 80% depth of hardening).
It was only with battleship-grade thicknesses that the “thick chill” face hardening became a problem though. But US Class A battleship armor plates were hardened to more like 50-55% depth.
@@bluemarlin8138 I didn't remember the specific thickness, just that Nathan Okun had made similar comments about the extremely thick depth of hardening.
the US had a hard-on for "SHATTER ALL THE SHELLS!" (and then making shells to try and pierce through those super hardened plates)
@@5peciesunkn0wn The USN armor and gun departments were practically running a one country arms race in the 20s and 30s.
@@shawnhamby9660 Yup lol.
Designers of tank armour had to relearn this lesson. They found that a soft steel inner layer much reduced crew injuries from spalling off the hard outer armour.
The Israelis wet one better--many decades ago--when they made the Mirkava double hulled with diesel in between, and a forward mounted engine to provide even more spalling protection.
Doesn’t the Abram’s also do the nifty diesel in between thing? Or am I making that up?
@@Meyer-gp7nqAbrams uses gas turbine engine, and the tank uses different compartment for ammo storage.
@@Meyer-gp7nq yeah there is fuel in a compartment between the driver and the front hull armor
@@muhammadnursyahmi9440 but they do not burn gas in the Abrams (usually diesel but they can pretty much burn anything)
Excellent presntation Drach, I for one would be most interested in further videos on the types of materials used in Battleshipo construction. I would imagine that there are a number of differnts steels used in building a warship, as each has properties specific to the job they are required to do.
I think in his armor video he talks about the different types of steel used (like british BB armor was probably the best while american steel used in the general construction of ships meant that the american cruisers had the most protection overall for their class).
I think it's fair to mention that the British did experiment with using a Stiff Upper Lip as light armor to much success, but found that the additional upkeep in tea and pasties was untenable at sea especially with war time shortages.
I'm interested - Had you ever made a video about the beginnings and the development of compartmentalization? It's a pretty important concept which contributes greatly to the survivability of ships, so i hope you had covered it already.
I don't remember if it was a specific video but he makes a few points about it when he talks about the damage some german cruisers sustained at the battle of Jutland and how british cruisers had even more compartments (in some cases) despite suffering from a case of "sudden explosions" due to bad ammunition handling practices. So his Jutland specials could be of interest. Also some of the guides might have covered a specific ship ( i remember something about one of the british cruisers surviving around 20 big hits). Sorry about the vague references but the videos are rather old.
@@gusty9053I had actually recently reached the battle of Jutland episodes, but sadly the closest he got was talking about the practice of leaving blast doors open on British ships as a way to increase fire rate and the British shells being either too brittle or their fuses exploding too early to cause significant internal damage. He only mentioned things relevant to the video (something i fully understand).
What i am more interested on is how people figured out the optimal size of a compartment (not that anyone had the perfect answer), the evolution of bulkheads, differences between navies and in the end - the impact of it on things ship related - from living on the ship to damage control and survivability.
I am 78 years old and still learning things.
Metallurgy is, as Yul Brynner said in The King And I, “a puzzlement.” But so is ballistics. As a curious person at the range, I’ve shot wood, rocks, bricks, watermelons and steel with rifles and handguns of various calibers. It’s always fascinating to see which ones explode melons and which ones just whiz right through, and which ones thump steel gongs hardest, which ones move the gong most and which ones actually damage the steel plates. Often the results are non-intuitive.
mxv squared.
@@TomDog5812to be fair, it's not *just* KE that matters -- a surprising amount of the terminal characteristics can be attributed to projectile shape/cross section as well as its own deformation characteristics
Which is why "Karomojo" Bell was able to drop elephants using a little Mannlicher-Schoenaur carbine chambered in 6.5 Mannlicher. That and extremely precise shot placement.@@mrsteamie4196
Will you discuss Dahlgren’s armor penetration tests and the development of the Dahlgren gun?
It’s an interesting topic I briefly delved in when discussing a Royal Navy v. US Navy pertaining to ironclads.
Drach - I heartily second/ third / fourth… the comments about more of this type of presentation. It was a good “basic” explanation of a difficult subject, complete with visual demonstrations of the principles involved. I didn’t need to be a PE to understand it, and yet it didn’t feel dumbed down. Well done.
Chocolate is similar to armor plate. It gets brittle when cold and soft when warm. And it can be tempered.
But a ship armored with chocolate would rapidly find itself denuded due to the crew being somewhat peckish...
@@davidg3944 cleaning up choco bits after firing BBs at it will be more fun than cleaning up broken glass. You just need an ice cream cone....
Drach’s experiments always ramp up to the point the very planet is endangered ... I love this channel.
A few more complex points concerning the differences between homogeneous, ductile plates and hard-faced plates:
(1) Hard-faced plates (Harvey, KC, Compound, Chilled Cast Iron) are penetrated mostly by velocity, not the shell weight. That is, the weight term only increases by the 0.2 power (small) but the velocity effect of increasing thickness penetrated goes up with the 1.21 power (if damage to the shell kept the same for all hits).
(2) For homogeneous, ductile plates (Mild Steel, Nickel-Steel, Krupp Chromium-Nickel-Steel, RHA, Non-Cemented Armor, Class "B" Armor, Special Treatment Steel, etc.) between 0.2 and 1.1 caliber thickness, the French 1890 De Marre Nickel-Steel Penetration Formula gives rather good penetration values (again, when shell damage kept constant) at right anglesd (not as good at other angles of impact) -- intertwines US Naval Proving Ground Dr. Hershey's WWII test data) using a De Marre Velocity Coefficient of ~1.22 to change from nickel to nickel-chromium armors. (Below 0.2 the plates have large dents or "dishes" form on impact and above 1.1 the hole made is by the shell nose "wedging" the armor sideways, while in the 0.2-1.1 region the shell nose forms small dishes, only wedges near the face of the plate, and forms thick triangular backward-bent triangular "petals" ringing the back of the hole (broken off much of the time). Here the total kinetic energy of the shell using both weight and velocity work in unison. So we get penetration proportional to [(weight) x (velocity-squared)] to the 0.714 power = (W)^0.714 x V^1.43. (Note that this velocity power is exactly double the penetration increase for all face-hardened plates. Interesting.)
(3) The hard face of face-hardened plates is brittle and breaks apart as it is punched through the hole and out the soft plate back shock-absorbing region. The thicker the face layer, the greater SCALING sets in to make bigger shells hitting proportionately scaled-up plates of identical properties penetrate more and more easily. Krupp originally used a 35% hard face and this had only a relatively small scaling effect weakening the thicker plates against bigger shells 9yet afain, with constant damage). Thinner faces do have less scaling, but the difference is not large. Going OVER 35% rapidly increases scaling, to the detriment of armor being hit by larger shells, though against small, cruiser-sized shells, the scaling is always small and works to make such shells penetrate better, not worse. Italy's Terni Company seems to have figured this out and had its thick plates have thinner proportional faces -- one thickness in cm -- than its thin plates. US WWII "Thick Chill" Class "A" face-hardened armor had a 55%face to try to damage the superior US WWII AP shells and this degraded this armor's resistance against the larger AP shells, though it was still stronger than US WWI-era Class "A" armor.
More of this? Not going to lie, it would be great!
This genuinely taught me something. Like yes I know naff all about military history (or didn't until I started watching this channel) but this is something so simpler and so cool that I now I know and I like how you actually demonstrate things.
I liked this--the experimental stuff was great--as well as archive fotos from Bethlehem steel! Your use of cardboard as analog for teak was good--although you did call cardboard more "ductile"--where what you meant to say was "tougher." Ductility is the mechanism to achieve toughness in metal (usually) but cardboard as well as teak achieve toughness a different way--through composite properties--strong directions and weak directions etc.
Interestingly, this composite effect became of great interest well past 1910! One of my graduate school professors, Frank Ko, did a lot of Army funded research on "ballistic" composites using kevlar, spectra, and many other fibrous composite materials. And of course the Army did adopt kevlar helmets--not sure if they still do that.
You sir are an excellent teacher. I knew some of the reasons behind compound armour, your experiments demonstrate for even beginner's. Well done!
104,000 views of this show about armor to me is amazing. Shows how focused your subscriber base is to your shows. Amazing! Have a Magical Day and Great 2024
5:28 I thought ductile was a type of building materials used by aquatic birds for kitchens and bathrooms
Too funny
Oh boy, this is going to be hideously technical! Sign me up!
I like that the Squarespace sponsorships double as a tutorial.
As a fellow engineer I salute your efforts, especially under the circumstances in the UK concerning rifles 😊
Yes Drach, please do investigate this matter further!
Pedantic correction: wood (and to a lesser extent carboard) isn't ductile. It doesn't plasticly deform much at all and doesn't strain harden. Instead it bends until it breaks suddenly, like a spring.
For a true ductile material (like lead or copper), you'll see the material inelastically deform by a large amount. This means that, once deformed, it doesn't come back to true. But it van deform a lot before it breaks.
To be even more pedantic, ductility is about tensile stress, but in talking about impacts, this shouldn't (isn't?) really be relevant; you should be talking about malleability - compressive stress. Lead isn't ductile, or at least, it isn't very ductile, but it does have considerable malleability. However, I do tend to read "ductile" all the time when I expect to see "malleable", so this is clearly a thing with engineers (I am a scientist, not an engineer!).
Best form of advertising is what you did at the start. Normally I avoid ads, but yours was pretty cool. That is exceptionally rare for me to say BTW. Maybe a first. Good Job.
Fascinating presentation for a layman. Thank Drach.
Timber backing is convenient for damage control, and just fixing to it generally in addition. Thank you for the demonstration.
Absolutely want to see more! Keep it up, Drach!👍
The practical demonstration was fantastic! Would love to see more in the future.
Absolutely fascinating presentation. Thanks for showing the process and progression of damage management.
Really enjoyed this scientific explanation of how armor works. I liked the practical demonstrations you did to help illustrate your points. So, of course I would be for more of these videos. If you get a chance to use TNT that would be a plus. 🤣
Thanks Drach, great segment. You did a awesome job with your substituted materials. 👍👍
Fascinating analogous practical demonstration of the principles of armor protection. Would definitely like too see more!
Loving the format, topic and style. Thanks, Drach!
Another great video. Great demonstration of practical material science and the complexity that exists in even the simple situation of trying to poke holes in a flat plate. More please
I think you win the most words to explain something for this week.
Outstanding presentation Drach! Thank you.
As a lifelong Pittsburgher who’s grandfather fought on Saipan and worked in the mills, rather proud to see so much Pittsburgh made iron being used. We are called iron city for a reason.
Brilliant, Drach! More of this type of video would be very welcome and most enlightening! 😎
Drach, loved this video! Keep them coming. Also hoping that you and yours have a lovely Christmas season
I, for one, would love this sort of practical and visual demonstration of the engineering behind ships. Thanks for the entertaining and educating video!
I always enjoy a practical demonstration.
This was a very effective demonstration. Well done!
Fascinating stuff! I love practical science demonstrationsas it really helps people understand exactly what's going on in a way that descriptions can't.
I love that you showed a practical example, im famillar with the concept is pretty good detail but it was alot of fun to see tested with such an easy thing to replicate
Yes indeed these are some of my favorite of your videos, and please don’t hesitate to make them extremely long.
I love these practical videos. I loved the age of sail food video as well!
Fort Nelson NR Portsmouth is the home of the royal armorys cannon and big gun collection and they have a giant plate with some impressive holes in it .10inch thick about 6ft sq with lots of shots taken at it from different angles.worth a look at the whole museum as there's a battle ship cannon on the front lawn (as of a couple of years ago)
Excellent Video. Very illustrativ to actually see it in done in the model. Thank you
Fascinating! I wouldn't of thought those materials would show results!
I would have loved to see follow up shots with the plastic BBs on the damaged composite armor.
Really enjoyed this video. I have watched many videos where they say x type of armor was used but never explained why. Very nice to finally know. Keep up the great work!
I really enjoyed this practical demonstration. Thanks and cheers 🍻
Well Done! Eagerly await a second part.
15 min? Duck tile?.....hard to get them feathered suckers to stay on the hull where you put them.
Moar glue! A big benefit of duck tile armour is the additional buoyancy, though.
@@thewheelieguy ah...yes, I believe your right...
That’s why you attach them with duck tape.
Thanks for employing the physical demonstrations.
Yes please more videos on this topic!!
Same idea as the laminated safety glass in the front windshield in automobiles. Fascinating video.
Thank you for this very informative and entertaining video. I will happily watch you break pain of glass with projectiles, so bring it on dude!
I for one would very much enjoy seeing the development of armour. And thank you for explaining in both a visual and a oral manor, it helps a non-engineer understand. Thank you for all your effort.
Excellent video, thanks Drach
Yes, I did enjoy that very much. I have been familiar with the material properties of iron and steel since my university days, but it's always fun to see ballistic tests.
Well done. My vote would be Yay, to continue along "anything to do with the naval experience of the era" presentations.
Drach demonstrating naval armour technology using household items. Simply AWESOME!
Great video, informative and entertaining, more like this please!
Great vid, would watch more of this!
OKay this was interesting. Yes I liked it... it was a good explanation for armor and why there was a backing. Please continue to do these please!
Love this engineering stuff!
I'm genuinely impressed at how well that cardboard/ glass demonstration worked 😀
Really enjoyed this one !!
Excellent demonstration! I really feel like I understand the inclusion of wood backing now...turns out holding the armor plate together is a really valuable function! And it's probably much more effective at stopping splinters (rather than generating more) than I thought.
Very interesting and well presented. Thank you.
Excellent presentation, thank you.
Great video, I look forward to more like it. Thanks
Solid!
Top KEK!
Peace be with you.
Yes, I like it’ll the deep dives into armor and how it works! TY
Your films are awesome!!
Trial and error is how we learn new things. I learned i dont know as much as i thought about metals, great video 👍
Woooo! Perfect mid afternoon uplift :)
Totally down for more of this
your channel is the greatest, cheers from Florida, Paul
Brilliantly well done
Great video, waiting for more
Thank You for improving my quality of Life
As always the best to you and yours.
PAB
Love the experiments!
This was great! Thank you.
I found this to be a very solid episode. I wouldn't put up any resistance to seeing more like it.
Yes please, more like this!
More please,well done!
Very interesting Thanks Drach.
Another excellent video. one of many.
Definitely would enjoy more like this.
For the algorithm!
I think you had too much fun in this. Yes please more of this
very informative. More please!
Well, I enjoyed this very much. More would be welcome.
YES THIS WAS VERY INTERESTING