Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

[lostnomad]

Treaty wasn't the only thing restraining the Iowa. As it stand the Iowa class could barely pass through the Panama Canal. Of course you could increase tonnage by making it longer but that has its own issues. Of course you could just make it into a cargo ship... that would be interesting

[Nemo]

nemo: just saying you do not need all that much armor to stop ASM's(conventional warheads) and negate HEAT versions.

And as I said it would stop current ASMs, but before you commissioned the ship a new missile to defeat it could already be made. I pointed to not only the Iowa, but the Yamato and Musashi. The order of battle for their defeat is fairly well documented. They were disabled by dive bombers and sunk by torpedoes. The difficulty in knocking out battlewagons was in hitting them. Guidance and mach speed solves that problem.

you would have enough armor that a direct hit by a tactical nuke would probably be survivable, assuming crew in the 'vital' areas.

No. I keep harping on the crossroads test because they actually tested this very idea. To steal shamelessly from wiki:

"Although the Able bomb missed its target, the Nevada, by nearly half a mile, and it failed to sink or to contaminate the battleship, a crew would not have survived.Goat #119, tethered inside a gun turret and shielded by armor plate, received enough fireball radiation to die four days later of radiation sickness having survived two days longer than goat #53, which was on the deck, unshielded.[80] Had the Nevada been fully manned, she would likely have become a floating coffin, dead in the water for lack of a live crew. In theory, every unprotected location on the ship received 10,000 rems (100 Sv) of initial nuclear radiation from the fireball.[70] Therefore, people deep enough inside the ship to experience a 90% radiation reduction would still have received a lethal dose of 1,000 rems."

Able was an air burst detonation at 500 feet altitude and missed by over two thousand feet. BB-36 USS Nevada was a standard ship of the line, with an armor belt between 8 and 13.5 inch in thickness. Her turrets were protected by 18 inches of steel. Still insufficient. Even with the crew "dead" the New York Times was unimpressed by the bomb. The Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal pointed out that "heavily built and heavily armored ships are difficult to sink unless they sustain underwater damage."

"Destroy all the equipment and kill all the men? Meh, so what." Your arms off! No it isn't! So what do they do? Baker!

Baker was set under the water and, even though it was nearly 600 feet away, managed to lift the twenty seven thousand ton battleship Arkansas out of the water. Her prow jammed itself into the silt at the bottom of the atoll as the stern was carried up into the rising water column. At 21 kilotons, wildly excessive force for a single ship. The Russian 1970s design SS n 19 shipwreck anti ship missile carries a warhead with estimated yields between 100 and 500 kilotons.




Again, armored ships have their role. But not in blue-water naval action. Its not something every ship needs, only the few specialized for close fire support. You can expect they'll take shots from mortars, RPGs, small caliber weapons, and even artillery gun fire from shore and small boats.

[Nemo]

And come to think of it, the Iraqis actually did fire on the Missouri with Silkworm missiles back in the Gulf War. Shot down as I recall.

[discord]

nemo: on Able test,
blatant wiki rip --> USS Arkansas (BB-33), one of two Wyoming-class battleships, commissioned in 1912. One of the oldest ships of World War II, and expended and wrecked in an atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in July 1946. That is where her wreckage still lies. <-- blatant wiki rip
not exactly designed with that threat in the equation, but it did show the major problems, the first being radiation killing the crew, that CAN be worked around, mostly by lowering crew requirements significantly.
btw. the scheme i proposed without special protection against ionized radiation would do a nice shiny 1/4000 or so reduction for the central vitals(compared to 1/10 reduction mentioned on your wiki quote), not quite enough, but a good start.
first layer of armor will probably be pretty melted no matter what from a close nuke hit, which is why the scheme called for several layers.

lostnomad: or you could have it sit deeper, displacement is displacement, actually the idea of going monitor style and having very little freeboard(distance between sea and deck) to limit target cross section and area needing heavy armor might work, would improve radiological protection quite a lot, would have some issues with seaworthiness, should be surmountable though, for survivability, include massive pumps, so we are flooding at a rate of 10m3/s? beh, just pump it out, high power water cannons might make pretty decent final line CIWS.


edit.
oops, my bad.
USS Nevada (BB-36) was a battleship, commissioned in 1916, damaged in the attack on Pearl Harbor, repaired and served during World War II, used as a target for Operation Crossroads after the war in 1946, and finally sunk for practice in 1948
navada survived operation crossroads whereas the arkansas did not, better design? nope, probably just luck really.

[pinheadh78]

I would be wary of doing a tour of duty in a surface combatant with very low freeboard in a primarily deep blue-water navy. Especially looking at how even an aircraft carrier (which is designs to be air-sealed in emergencies) gets tossed around in this storm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnyFjCJPwtk. If the freeboard is low enough you might as well be a submarine and history is filled with modern ships that sank due to not having enough clearance between deck and ocean waves.

You could successfully do a low freeboard surface-craft in the littorals region but at that point your building a shallow-draft fast-attack type or patrol craft and there are dozens of examples of those in modern navies. A number of nations do take this route as they don't have to defend assets or interests beyond their local shoreline and so a heavily armed small ship is acceptable.

Attempting to protect your ship and make it survive a nuclear attack in the modern age is kinda futile. Sure many ships in the nuke-tests did survive the blast and resulting waves; but I doubt those would be in any condition to keep fighting; those are mission-killed ships. Better to just make a low-observable surface ship if you must get in close or use long-range aircraft and keep your major surface assets out at sea offshore. If a nuke is inbound to your fleet then the situation is beyond conventional weapons anyway.

(Edit)
The original all missile Arsenal Ship actually had a fairly low profile in the water, but then it wasn't trying to be anything other than a floating missile platform. With the advent of SSGN type submarines and LRAP ammo for ship-board cannons the value of a single-role Arsenal-Ship decreased. Zumwalt is expensive and was built primarily for gunfire support; but it can do other things to a degree with the hanger ans sonars. There is another Arsenal Ship proposed which is built off an existing platform type (LPD 17 San Antonio Class) but that would be able to do missile defense (big radars), storage, multi-use platform, etc so more value than just a bunch o missiles.

Arsenal Ship wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_ship

[RedDwarfIV]

Now I'm imagining the Battlestar Galactica floating near North Korea having tiny nukes thrown at it while it blasts military installations.

A friend of mine said the Zumwalt's railguns would be able to reach the RADAR horizon.

[GeoModder]

and armoring scheme, the main reason to keep weight down on the iowa was treaty based, not allowed to build it any heavier,...

Erm, no.
The 1935 Second Naval Treaty of London was only in effect for 3 years until the onset of WWII.
While design of the Iowa class started before the onset of war, the construction took place outside the bounds of this Treaty.

Maybe you mixed up with the South Dakota class?

[discord]

geo: wiki rip--> Three classes of "treaty" battleships were built or laid down by the United States: the North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes. <-- wiki rip.
the montana class which was planned but never built weighed in at 70k, about 50% heavier than the iowa which admittedly had lots of free displacment not used(aka. sit deeper in the water, as seen by the climb in weight as it was refitted), but was technically a treaty ship.

red dwarf: and beyond, theoretically, but i am still not sold on that, small shells, tiny boom.... /me not impressed.

pinhead: as i said, issues with seaworthiness, but considering that this theoretical boat would probably have more in common with a sub(fully NBC secured), it would probably be better to let the waves crash OVER the boat in rough seas, perhaps some sort of deployable wave breaker shield.....nah, would be a bitch to engineer, submersible? could work, but again, would be a bitch to engineer.

on surviving nukes, people just watched the devastation of operation crossroads and said 'no effing way' and gave up, as far as i know no one has ever really put it on the table and tried to determine feasibility since then, my idea is mostly ablative in approach, and would only really work on a frikkin huge ship(50k tons and up, approx), same really for armor on smaller ships, you don't armor it to stop everything, just make it difficult(either forcing HEAT which will do minimal damage/hit, or better penetrators with less boom/weight) and if they get inside, design it with frikkin blow out panels, armored compartment, easiest path would be to blow out the armor plate designed to do so, difficult to get in, easy to get out, ablative.

as i have said before, the question is if stealth at sea or armor is the better approach, and imho it is a closer run than people think, impenetrable armor is a no go, can't be done, retaining mission operability after sustaining hits? probably.
think about it like this, stealth helps you avoid getting hit, armor lets you shrug off hits that would wreck the stealth boat....the issue i put forth is can we hit our own boats with our own weapons? if yes, then stealth(short of submerged) is pretty pointless unless against 3rd rates.

[RedDwarfIV]

red dwarf: and beyond, theoretically, but i am still not sold on that, small shells, tiny boom.... /me not impressed.

You do still need to be able to see what you're firing at. I don't know, maybe they could use drones to guide shots in from beyond the RADAR horizon.

[NOMAD]

red dwarf: and beyond, theoretically, but i am still not sold on that, small shells, tiny boom.... /me not impressed.

You do still need to be able to see what you're firing at. I don't know, maybe they could use drones to guide shots in from beyond the RADAR horizon.

Drones would be a good idea, but they wold need to launched before hand or be on a high altitude patrol (Globehawk type) before hand, in order to get the need info. The only problem I see is the enemy could jam or receive the images/data or try to shoot down the drones (cheap yes but a ship or a fleet can carry so many so a knowledge enemy will be shooting them down). however I find id funny u mention drones because that what aircraft carriers and/or on ship launch planes were meant for, to scout for the fleet and relay shot splash info back to the battleship.

The only problem with any ships ( or vehicle mounted weapons) is they their weapons usually out range their sensors/targeting systems. For the WW1 class on all nations optics was the only way to acquired a target, with gear bases computers helping with targeting. By WW2 most optics had improved and the range increase on getting accurate hits (having better guns was an motivation) but with radar (even the old set) they could see the shell hits. By the cold war and now, electronic means is the main reason ( but in most cases visual ID is need with some exceptions where IFF are known over range and missile can be fired). Stealth is a away to avoid detection or reduce it. For me the whole armour vs stealth depends on the current conditions and the ships mission. Main fleet ships, stealth/armour mix, since this will allow for reduced detection while keeping some durability/survivability ( as most modern surface ships have stealth elements build into the hull). covert mission or hard areas (stealth mostly) IE the US navy ( and most of the western nations) littoral combat ships use some stealth design with emphasise on maneuvering speed and ICWS for their treats (small or medium boats and in shore threats). heavy combat ( armour up with some stealth for good measure).

IIRC, in Gulf war one, the Iowa class did use drones for their main guns targeting. but I may be wrong or thinking of another conflict.

[lostnomad]

Old memory of a documentary about the Gulf War soliders started surrendering to the drones because they heard loud buzzing sounds like a lawnmower before getting hit.

I think any ship with a hangar carries a few drones now a days.

[GeoModder]

geo: wiki rip--> Three classes of "treaty" battleships were built or laid down by the United States: the North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes. <-- wiki rip.
the montana class which was planned but never built weighed in at 70k, about 50% heavier than the iowa which admittedly had lots of free displacment not used(aka. sit deeper in the water, as seen by the climb in weight as it was refitted), but was technically a treaty ship.

Please read the whole paragraph...

wiki rip --> Design of the Iowa-class began in 1938 and they were ordered in 1939; with the treaty no longer effective carried 16-inch guns on a displacement of 45,000 tons. <-- wiki rip.
They shouldn't have been heavier then 35,000 tons if they had stayed within the bounds of the treaty.

[pinheadh78]

Found this on the web today - fascinating article on the history of the development of Surface to Air Missiles; the first part discusses the increasing risk to surface combatants from airborne threats and the need to develop a reliable ship based SAM solution.

http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stor ... -missiles/

[discord]

geo: i think it is you who need to read the whole article ---> For this reason, in 1938 the treaty parties agreed on a new displacement limit of 45,000 tons for battleships. <---- due to some significant naval powers NOT signing the treaty, and building larger ships.

whatever, all i am saying is that no one seems to have done a feasibility study of armor vs stealth on ships...after crossroads they just said 'can't armor against nukes, table flip, give up.' and as been pointed out, not all conflicts are nuclear.

[Nemo]

Its not a matter of even needing a feasibility study, its flatly not possible. The math is there. If the nuke gets in close it will kill the crew (air burst) or sink the ship (underwater shock).


Remember Goat #119 in Able shot? 21 kiloton Fatman nuke, which remember missed the target by a wide enough margin to invoke a hearing, killed goat 119 with radiation poisoning through 18 inches of steel armor. Steel radiation reduction is 1/2 at 1 inch. Thats .5^18 for 1 / 262144th of the total radiation dose. Except not. Radiation isn't like a kinetic penetrator. It isnt kind enough to come in through the armor belt, its going to come in the seems and joints and mechanisms. Radiation flooded the whole ship and would kill every crewman on the Nevada. In a miss.



As far as underwater shock goes, the South Dakota and Iowa classes shared an underwater protection system. It was rated at 680lbs of tnt. Admittedly they had a very poor protection system which was only discovered late in building the Dakotas, too late to change for the Iowas. It was a novel concept at the time which used an armor shell backed by fuel oil pockets backed by further armor. The North Carolina class had better systems which relied on the elasticity of their bulkheads which could take on 1000lbs of tnt. The North Carolina actually was torpedoed at one point and took on only about 900 tons of water. Which was quite good, she still made 24 25 knots or so.

All of it is irrelevant in the face of a nuke. We go from fractions of a ton of tnt to thousands of tons of tnt. The entire physics of the shock wave change entirely to boot. The explosion vaporizes the surrounding water and throws a column of water thousands of feet in the air, the surrounding water rushes in to fill the gap. The Arkansas was at the edge of the column and had it not been for its prow digging into the bottom would have been sent straight into the drink, face first like an Olympic diver. Provided she wasnt flipped stern over bow onto her back that is.

These arent phantom fears either. Our potential opponents have fielded, for decades, nuclear warhead capable anti ship missiles. Should the need arise, new ones could be devised and put into production on a shorter time scale than the ship in question.

And yes, like I said not all war is nuclear. And yes you should assume the war is going to be nuclear just as one should assume it will be non-nuclear. But its almost an aside to the fact that a dozen conventional weapons are all that were needed to take out even the most heavily armored warships of all time. And that modern warships mission systems, like radar and communications, are more fragile than systems of that period making mission kills easier.


Again, not the whole fleet. Armor shallow water combatants that risk contested areas but not the blue water navy.

[GeoModder]

geo: i think it is you who need to read the whole article ---> For this reason, in 1938 the treaty parties agreed on a new displacement limit of 45,000 tons for battleships. <---- due to some significant naval powers NOT signing the treaty, and building larger ships.

Thus the original pretext was no longer valid and the original treaty became void.
EOC.

[discord]

nemo: yes, the little piggies died, the two mentioned were on deck, and in a turret, does this mean radiation cannot be stopped? it sure as bloody hell can be.
as i mentioned, main turrets would need insane amounts of armor, since they could only have one effective layer, but modern science knows just a tad bit more about how to stop radiation today as compared to WW1 ship builders.
seams? joints? no, the impulse from a nuke is a pretty direct line of fire, FALLOUT will do what you said, but that is a different beast all together, and ionization of objects can create the illusion of
what you said, but neither of those happened in any large amount during Able shot, Baker however was another story entirely, lots of fallout there, would not be relevant to a mobile target in open sea though.

wiki rip ----> Fifty-seven guinea pigs, 109 mice, 146 pigs, 176 goats, and 3,030 white rats had been placed on 22 target ships in stations normally occupied by people.[76] 35% of these animals died or were sacrificed in the three months following the explosion: 10% were killed by the air blast, 15% were killed by radiation, and 10% were killed by the researchers as part of later study.[77] The most famous survivor was Pig 311, which was found swimming in the lagoon after the blast and was brought back to the National Zoo in Washington, DC. <--- wiki rip

and piggie in turret died after four days, outside turret after 2 days, that indicates a pretty heavy dose, approx. 8-30 GY inside the turret according to lethality time, so, to get 30GY down to manageable levels, you need about 80-100mm(about 4-5 50% reductions) more armor plate.
nevada, 457mm turret armor.
iowa, 500mm turret armor....not quite enough.
montana, 572mm turret armor...and should bring it down from 30GY to about 0.5GY, quite survivable, even without care.

just saying it is possible, and modern methods of shielding can make it even better.
1000mm of steel would reduce radiation by approx 1/1125899906842624(20mm will halve radiation, so divide by two fifty times, 2^50=1125899906842624) or effectively plain stop it, there are composites better at it than steel for both weight and thickness.

again, i think it is possible, heck i KNOW it is possible since science says so, the question for me is practicality.

geo: This London Naval Treaty effectively ended on 1 September 1939 and the first Iowa class was ordered on 1 July 1939, it was a bloody treaty ship, so says those that know. there was some small change to underwater armoring which gained it some weight before the keel was laid, but it was designed as a treaty ship.
EOC? End of Conversation? never seen that meaning before.

[Nemo]

Your math is still assuming the 21 kiloton Fatman, and a miss.


Inverse square law, figure the strength of the dose had the bomb not been thousands of feet farther than it should have. And check my math because its been an age. It went off nearly 4 times farther away than it should have been, surface of a sphere is 4 pi R^2. For a value of 1 you get 12.5. For a value of 4 you get 201. The radiation would have been 16 times stronger. No, I did some rounding in there its actually more like 3.98 times farther, lets call it 15 times stronger to be generous. And simplify the math.

The 1970s SS N 19 Shipwreck, which I keep mentioning, sports a 100-500 kt yield. Lets take the lowest end setting of 100 kilotons and presume for the moment it doesn't miss and properly detonates 500 feet from the ship. Multiply your radiation figures by 15 to account for the correct placement, then by 5 to account for the stronger weapon. Using your low end estimate of 8 Gy, thats 8*15*5 for 600 Gy exposure. Between guidance systems correcting the miss and the increased yields of the weapons your figures are off by orders of magnitude. And we can creep the detonation range in, and the war head yield up, very easily as you add more and more armor.

What I was trying to point out though, is that these figures are deceptive. Youre basing them around the stated armor thicknesses but that is incorrect. The armor is not evenly distributed in a sphere. It was assigned to areas where kinetic penetration was probable and tapered and thinned elsewhere. You need to assume the thinnest, not the thickest, areas are where the radiation enters the compartment. Doors, vents, joints, welds, rivets, gun barrels, armor belt facings, etc etc.


Radiation shielding/proofing works on land under the assumption that the building in question isn't the target and that the bomb lands at some distance. You rely on inverse square coupled with the proofing to narrow the lethality range of the blast. You dont get the protection of the inverse square on a capital ship sitting on the ocean.

[RedDwarfIV]

IIRC, FAEs are up to 4Kt.

That's a conventional explosive that could easily punch a ship in half. It'd have to be a big missile though, which would make it easy to shoot down.

[discord]

red dwarf: FAE are very powerful, the problem is applying the power, since it creates that power by spreading out the boom stuff in the air and thereby creating an accelerating shockwave, takes time to set up, and not exactly armor piercing.

nemo: i did mention before that a NEW armoring scheme would need a more distributed armor, a step away from the 'all or nothing' scheme to a more ablative approach with several layers instead, and a more uniform armoring.
that been said, ionized radiation does not really bend much, nor go 'around' stuff much at all, i think it can reflect under certain circumstances but that is more along the lines of theoretical physics... and ofcourse it can ionize a object so that in turn projects ionized radiation, but it does not go 'around' a object.

fifteen times greater... assuming the higher 30Gy value, always count pessimistically, 15 times higher gets us approx. 7 Gy inside a montana turret...assuming ofcourse these numbers are correct but good enough ball park figures, which would mean, with treatment, a 50+% mortality and it would take the men somewhere between 2 days and a couple of weeks to die, not good at all, but even at one of the most exposed 'vital' positions on a ship not designed to withstand nukes, still decent chance to survive a tactical warhead....just saying that if someone with real armoring knowledge tried to figure it out it would probably be possible to armor 'survivable' on a large ship against tactical nukes.

next would ofcourse be the rather heavy CIWS interdiction, so it would be a standoff explosion unless saturation fire was employed, on a nuclear field, just saying that a armored vessel can take the hit better than the stealthy ship can be missed, close is close enough after all.

seriously though, the radiation is the simple part, neutron bombs as anti tnak weapons have been....ditched, due to the distance crew kills will happen at is pretty much the distance the boom kills the tank anyway, and that is with enhanced radiation bombs, which have much higher percentage of the energy as ionized radiation, a large warship can be more heavily armored as compared to a tank.