Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

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Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by fredgiblet »

discord wrote:and on smaller radar cross section....sure, nice and all, but if the choice is between smaller RCS and armor, I personally would opt for armor, especially on large ships....because no matter how small RCS you have, modern radars can detect a single bird in flight at obscene ranges....a 100+meters ship does not have a smaller RCS then a bird.
honestly, the US navy figured out that stealth ships do not work in the fucking 80's when they tried out a pure stealth ship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Shadow the result was 'yup, not a single radar return on the thing, we still knew where the bloody hell it was due to radar SHADOW what should be behind it was not.' and that was in the 80's our radars are slightly better now, especially in interpreting the data which is what this was about.
Our obsession with stealth is amusing and disheartening. Without stealth the Zumwalt class destroyers might be remotely affordable, without stealth the F-35 might not be a retardedly expensive, terribly late questionable performer. But it's the 21st century and our friggin PISTOLS have to be coated with RAM these days.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

fredgiblet wrote: Our obsession with stealth is amusing and disheartening. Without stealth the Zumwalt class destroyers might be remotely affordable, without stealth the F-35 might not be a retardedly expensive, terribly late questionable performer. But it's the 21st century and our friggin PISTOLS have to be coated with RAM these days.
Without stealth there's no need for new weapons systems at all; you could get the same performance out of improved F-16's or F-18's and Burke-class destroyers. I think there's an argument to be made that stealth is not a crucial capability for naval vessels, but I don't think the same argument can be made for combat aircraft.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

Can a fighter's RADAR detect another fighter's RADAR shadow?

As for advances, well, the UK needs something to replace its carrier Harriers, and the F-35 was going to be it, because it was to have a large vertical fan engine to shorten the distance needed for landing. Without stealth, we wouldn't have to launch the new Queen Elizabeth class carriers with nothing but Ospreys and helicopters to fly off them.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by fredgiblet »

Arioch wrote:Without stealth there's no need for new weapons systems at all; you could get the same performance out of improved F-16's or F-18's and Burke-class destroyers. I think there's an argument to be made that stealth is not a crucial capability for naval vessels, but I don't think the same argument can be made for combat aircraft.
You'll notice I didn't include the F-117, F-22 or B-2 in that list. Stealth has value for some roles, deep strike and air superiority will benefit greatly, but something like the F-35 which WILL have weapons hanging off it at all times is going to gain a lot less from it while still paying the same cost, both monetary and performance.

In the meantime the Russians are adding IRST to every fighter, which will drastically reduce the value of stealth even on the F-22 as it doesn't seem to have much if any concessions to IR stealth. The claimed capabilities of some of the IRST systems are very impressive, but just claimed for now. I think that we will find that stealth isn't as useful as we expect if we fight someone with a decent setup.

I think that improved F-16s and F-18s might have been a better choice personally.
RedDwarfIV wrote:Can a fighter's RADAR detect another fighter's RADAR shadow?
I'm not certain what you mean by shadow. If you mean can they see the "hole" in the sky then not really, the radar waves don't return and they wouldn't have returned anyway. If they are looking DOWN then maybe, but then you're picking through ground clutter.
As for advances, well, the UK needs something to replace its carrier Harriers, and the F-35 was going to be it, because it was to have a large vertical fan engine to shorten the distance needed for landing. Without stealth, we wouldn't have to launch the new Queen Elizabeth class carriers with nothing but Ospreys and helicopters to fly off them.
You really should have learned not to trust our development plans by now.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

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fredgiblet wrote:You'll notice I didn't include the F-117, F-22 or B-2 in that list. Stealth has value for some roles, deep strike and air superiority will benefit greatly, but something like the F-35 which WILL have weapons hanging off it at all times is going to gain a lot less from it while still paying the same cost, both monetary and performance.
We don't currently have a replacement for the kinds of strike missions that the F-117 was good at; B-2's are ridiculous overkill for ordinary deep strike missions, and F-22's are better used as air superiority craft (and both are a limited resource that can't be replaced if lost). F-35's can fly clean with an internal load similar to the F-117, or an additional external load if the situation permits. If for some reason we need more strike aircraft that don't need to be stealthy, well... we already have a lot of those.
fredgiblet wrote:In the meantime the Russians are adding IRST to every fighter, which will drastically reduce the value of stealth even on the F-22 as it doesn't seem to have much if any concessions to IR stealth. The claimed capabilities of some of the IRST systems are very impressive, but just claimed for now. I think that we will find that stealth isn't as useful as we expect if we fight someone with a decent setup.
Stealth isn't going to be the perfect protection that it once was, but I think the biggest threat to a strike craft is ground fire; it will be the responsibility of the F-22's to handle enemy fighters. Stealth may not be perfect protection going forward, but any aircraft without it is going to take heavy losses against any serious opponent.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by fredgiblet »

Mr Bojangles wrote:The US and various European powers are also developing and mounting IRST to aircraft. They're not really new, but likely a bit better than their predecessors from the 60s (yes, there's some sarcasm there). I am curious as to their accuracy and tracking capabilities. It's an arms race: armor vs. bullets; stealth vs. detection.
They did, but they were always an afterthought. The Russian ones seem to be treated as important as the radar, which makes sense in a world with stealth. I don't have the link anymore but I was reading a page that was claiming that one of the new Russian fighters was going to have an IRST capable of tracking a fighter at something like 40 miles.
Arioch wrote:We don't currently have a replacement for the kinds of strike missions that the F-117 was good at; B-2's are ridiculous overkill for ordinary deep strike missions, and F-22's are better used as air superiority craft (and both are a limited resource that can't be replaced if lost). F-35's can fly clean with an internal load similar to the F-117, or an additional external load if the situation permits. If for some reason we need more strike aircraft that don't need to be stealthy, well... we already have a lot of those.
I don't think we will with the F-35. The F-117 was stealthy in the IR spectrum as well, the F-35 doesn't appear to be, so our enemies will need to invest in IR as well as radar, but that's likely to be a significantly smaller investment than we are making in the F-35. It's more flexible than the F-117 certainly, but I don't think it will be as successful in deep strikes on prepared enemies. Only time will tell.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Mr Bojangles »

fredgiblet wrote: They did, but they were always an afterthought. The Russian ones seem to be treated as important as the radar, which makes sense in a world with stealth. I don't have the link anymore but I was reading a page that was claiming that one of the new Russian fighters was going to have an IRST capable of tracking a fighter at something like 40 miles.
The US Navy is serious about it now. As for the range figure, there's a similar one in the Wikipedia article about IRST.
fredgiblet wrote: I don't think we will with the F-35. The F-117 was stealthy in the IR spectrum as well, the F-35 doesn't appear to be, so our enemies will need to invest in IR as well as radar, but that's likely to be a significantly smaller investment than we are making in the F-35. It's more flexible than the F-117 certainly, but I don't think it will be as successful in deep strikes on prepared enemies. Only time will tell.
It's a race. Aircraft become harder to detect via radar, so the opposition focuses on another sensor suite (IR in this case). The new sensor nullifies some of the advantages of existing stealth systems, so stealth is forced to advance. The endless cycle of weapon development. But, some stealth is better than none.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

After doing some research, it appears that the Air Force's current plan for deep-strike missions is a "family of systems" called Long Range Strike (LRS). It consists of:

LRS-B: an "optionally manned" stealth bomber that is thought to be essentially a scaled-down B-2, using existing technologies.
UAS: a long-endurance stealthy unmanned air system.
LRS-M: a next-generation cruise missile.

The LRS-B program is targeted for mid-2020's, 80-100 aircraft (compare with 20 B-2's today), at $550 million per unit.

However, I also ran across this:
Image

Meet the SR-72

SR-72 is a proposed Lockheed-Martin Mach 6 unmanned hypersonic demonstrator aircraft, targeted somewhere around 2030.

“Hypersonic aircraft, coupled with hypersonic missiles, could penetrate denied airspace and strike at nearly any location across a continent in less than an hour,” said Brad Leland, Lockheed Martin program manager, Hypersonics. “Speed is the next aviation advancement to counter emerging threats in the next several decades. The technology would be a game-changer in theater, similar to how stealth is changing the battlespace today.”

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

Sleeeeeeek.

I love that plane.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by discord »

bojangles: basically a large scale laser range finder, there are several different approaches, i was thinking of the parallax with two sources and find the angle between, at a light second range, you would want some range between the two sensors.

which ship class? every ship class since the 1980's? not a single modern navy in the world has any armor whatsoever today, not that i know of any way....and it is fucking stupid.

seeing the shadow? still possible, since you can't see the waves and 'ground clutter' behind the stealthy ship....

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by fredgiblet »

discord wrote:which ship class? every ship class since the 1980's? not a single modern navy in the world has any armor whatsoever today, not that i know of any way....and it is fucking stupid.
Why? The days of gun battles are long over, modern torpedoes can break the back of ships even if they are fully armored, modern missiles can punch through anything short of battleship armor. We don't have battleships anymore, so battleship armor is right out.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Arioch »

Some naval warships do have armor, but it's internal to protect critical things like the CIC, and made of modern materials like kevlar. In addition to the points that fred makes, modern naval warfare is almost entirely dependent on sensors; almost any explosive hit is going to shred your radars, and that will leave the ship blind and useless. External armor won't prevent this.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by discord »

fred: common error, missiles 'can punch through' well maybe but how much DAMAGE is done is another question entirely, compartmentalization, internal bulkheads, onion layout with less important stuff outward, and so on.
and 'torpedoes can break the backs of armored ships' consider two things here, first that no truly armored ship has been built since pretty much the invention of the A-bomb aka WW2, and that you could detonate frikkin nukes close by ships basically made for WW1 and they managed just fine....explosives under the ship is a issue, and you would need some reinforcement to manage that, but not an insurmountable engineering task.... nuclear tipped torpedoes would be pretty damn bad though.

a more important question is rather what use is 'stealth' features on a ship? it's not invisible by any stretch, stopping incoming munitions from first rate nations is a matter of active decoys and hard stops with CIWS and AMM's, true, stealth features help the decoys....but armor would work too, what i am getting at is that armoring a ship is not stupid whereas no armor is.

a double spaced armor with freshwater(or fuel) tanks in the spacing will stop most HEAT munitions cold, and you would not need BB sized ship for this....at which point most missiles would for all intents and purposes bounce, short of nukes.

on radars taking damage.....it is true, the answer is redundancy and protected backups....and passive systems, without active EM emissions pretty hard to hit. there are solutions to this problem.

my biggest issue is that most seem to just blindly disregard that path, and i think that is seriously stupid.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by fredgiblet »

fred: common error, missiles 'can punch through' well maybe but how much DAMAGE is done is another question entirely, compartmentalization, internal bulkheads, onion layout with less important stuff outward, and so on.
and 'torpedoes can break the backs of armored ships' consider two things here, first that no truly armored ship has been built since pretty much the invention of the A-bomb aka WW2, and that you could detonate frikkin nukes close by ships basically made for WW1 and they managed just fine....explosives under the ship is a issue, and you would need some reinforcement to manage that, but not an insurmountable engineering task.... nuclear tipped torpedoes would be pretty damn bad though.
Compartmentalization is a separate issue which they DO use to prevent a single blow from crippling the ship. We know the torpedoes can break the backs of armored ships because that's what they were designed to do. That was, in fact, the point of them. Penetrating the armor from the side didn't work well against battleships for the very reasons you mention, so they realized that they could send the torpedo UNDER the ship and detonate it and achieve a kill that way, it's likely possible to avoid that, but would again require a major increase in protection, which means less weight available elsewhere.
a more important question is rather what use is 'stealth' features on a ship? it's not invisible by any stretch, stopping incoming munitions from first rate nations is a matter of active decoys and hard stops with CIWS and AMM's, true, stealth features help the decoys....but armor would work too, what i am getting at is that armoring a ship is not stupid whereas no armor is.
I agree that active defenses are more useful than passive defenses, however the amount of armor required to make armor useful is significant, so the weight and space required is significant, so the cost (not just monetary) of adding it is significant. Putting 2 or 3 inches of armor like an old light cruiser won't really cut it, and since missiles will almost universally strike above the waterline you're making the ship more top-heavy, unless you counterbalance it which makes the weight go up more.
a double spaced armor with freshwater(or fuel) tanks in the spacing will stop most HEAT munitions cold, and you would not need BB sized ship for this....at which point most missiles would for all intents and purposes bounce, short of nukes.
I'm fairly certain that most anti-ship missiles don't use HEAT warheads, the primary value of HEAT is to enhance penetration in a smaller package, the missiles don't really worry that much about size so they just pack more explosives in, also HEAT tends to make smaller holes, against a ship you want big holes so that more water can get in. That also only works at the waterline, if the missile strikes above they can get a "kill" by rendering the ship blind without having to pass through the double-hull. Additionally the missiles are already usually set to detonate after striking so they can penetrate, if the double-hull isn't thick enough then it will still penetrate, just possibly not as far.
on radars taking damage.....it is true, the answer is redundancy and protected backups....and passive systems, without active EM emissions pretty hard to hit. there are solutions to this problem.
Redundancy increases weight and space requirements, making the ship bigger, more top-heavy and an easier target. Passive systems are in use, however they are vulnerable to damage as well, and generally less useful. A better solution would be datalinks sharing information so that if ANY ship had functional sensors then they can all leech off of it. But that will be less effective still due to transmission delays.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Mr Bojangles »

discord wrote:bojangles: basically a large scale laser range finder, there are several different approaches, i was thinking of the parallax with two sources and find the angle between, at a light second range, you would want some range between the two sensors.

which ship class? every ship class since the 1980's? not a single modern navy in the world has any armor whatsoever today, not that i know of any way....and it is fucking stupid.

seeing the shadow? still possible, since you can't see the waves and 'ground clutter' behind the stealthy ship....
My point was that parallax doesn't really net you much. Sure, it may work in a worst-case scenario, but if you're in a situation where you have to use parallax rather than your primary sensors, you have a whole mess of other concerns.

I was referring to the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Way over budget and of dubious worth. Fred brought it up earlier in this very thread.

I can't speak to all types of modern naval vessels, but at the very least US supercarriers are armored, internally and externally.

Wouldn't most shipboard radar systems filter out coasts and waves as mostly background noise?

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by RedDwarfIV »

In John Birmingham's Axis Of Time book series, the Multinational Task Force ships all have AIs that use a 'Cooperative Battle Link' to better organise battles and allow the use of multiple ships' sensors. Well, except the Indonesian ships, but those were built in the 90s.
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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by discord »

bojangles: range finders use basically two different methods, the time it takes for a signal to go there and back again(radar/lidar/etc) and the difference of angle between two sensors(parallax), one being active and thereby having some issues, the other usually being passive and thereby having some issues, if the target fudges with active sensors you might have trouble getting accurate range readings but you will get pretty accurate direction reading, two sensors with different angles will by triangulation get accurate range and velocity...not saying one system is superior to the other, just saying both should be used for redundancy.

nope on the armor, there are some internal bulkheads(the all or nothing armoring system taken to silly levels, by armoring only the essentials) but anything 50cal or bigger would do very bad things to ANY modern ship since external armoring on modern warships is about the same as on civilian vessels, and that is just.....wrong.

filtering out for the reader, yes...the data is there however just not shown since it is not relevant, simple software patch to look for regular radar shadows and *pop* there is the invisible ship, within a hundred meters or less.

Fred: you are aware that weight/space requirement argument is rather silly, since the cheapest way to transport high bulk high mass goods is by sea? add 20% more mass to the zumwalt for instance, whoopity effing do, it will have a draft of 8.9 meters instead of 8.4.... it will need perhaps as much as 10% more engine power to compensate and keep the same mobility.

cost? about 1000$/ton adding 3000 tons equals 3 million in material cost(unit cost at 3.4 billion makes this chump change), and would give about 4cm all over the ship give or take a little, which is twice that of the bradley btw.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by Mr Bojangles »

discord wrote:bojangles: range finders use basically two different methods, the time it takes for a signal to go there and back again(radar/lidar/etc) and the difference of angle between two sensors(parallax), one being active and thereby having some issues, the other usually being passive and thereby having some issues, if the target fudges with active sensors you might have trouble getting accurate range readings but you will get pretty accurate direction reading, two sensors with different angles will by triangulation get accurate range and velocity...not saying one system is superior to the other, just saying both should be used for redundancy.
Yes, I know how rangefinders and triangulation work. In fleet actions, I imagine networked sensors would be common. They are in the US Navy. I advocate redundancy as well.
discord wrote: nope on the armor, there are some internal bulkheads(the all or nothing armoring system taken to silly levels, by armoring only the essentials) but anything 50cal or bigger would do very bad things to ANY modern ship since external armoring on modern warships is about the same as on civilian vessels, and that is just.....wrong.
Actually, US Nimitz-class carriers do carry armor. The flight deck, the magazines, fuel cells, the reactor compartments, and the waterline. Additional Kevlar armor was added to "vital areas" which I imagine would be the CIC, comm/power feeds and crew spaces. I believe the waterline armor is only present on the Cold War-era members of the class due to the real threat of Soviet attack subs. Newer members of the class use a higher strength alloy in their construction.

Additionally, Nimitz-class carriers are extremely compartmentalized. Their internal configurations are designed with explosive penetration (torpedoes/missiles) in mind. The whole bulk of the ship acts as a shield.

Edit: I can't speak for other classes of ship. I don't think a .50 cal would do very much to any ship the size of a destroyer on up.
discord wrote: filtering out for the reader, yes...the data is there however just not shown since it is not relevant, simple software patch to look for regular radar shadows and *pop* there is the invisible ship, within a hundred meters or less.
I suppose that could work. Though, I would debate the utility of increasing system noise to pick out shadows. The stealthier the ship, the more noise you'd have to accept. The more noise you have, the worse your targeting would become.
discord wrote: Fred: you are aware that weight/space requirement argument is rather silly, since the cheapest way to transport high bulk high mass goods is by sea? add 20% more mass to the zumwalt for instance, whoopity effing do, it will have a draft of 8.9 meters instead of 8.4.... it will need perhaps as much as 10% more engine power to compensate and keep the same mobility.

cost? about 1000$/ton adding 3000 tons equals 3 million in material cost(unit cost at 3.4 billion makes this chump change), and would give about 4cm all over the ship give or take a little, which is twice that of the bradley btw.
Are you looking for more or less complete armoring over the entire hull and superstructure? Because not even WWII battleships were that heavily armored. They had belts and deck plating, but their superstructures were light on the armoring. And while their armor proved effective against shelling, it wasn't anywhere near enough to stop torpedoes.

The fact of the matter is, since the invention of firearms, rocketry and high explosives, it has always been easier and cheaper to develop and deploy armor-defeating systems. Sure, you can cover your ship in feet of the strongest armor you can find. Your enemy will just drop a bunker buster on it rather than fire an ASM (because with that much armor, your ship may as well be a stationary bunker).

While armor has its place, and always will, navies are moving more and more towards active defenses. Rather than trying to absorb the damage, they want to stop it from happening at all. Your best bet is always going to be to not get hit in the first place, right? Assuming something does get through, well, that's where strategic armor placement, compartmentalization and proper internal configuration come in to play to ensure your ship can continue to fight.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by fredgiblet »

discord wrote:Fred: you are aware that weight/space requirement argument is rather silly, since the cheapest way to transport high bulk high mass goods is by sea? add 20% more mass to the zumwalt for instance, whoopity effing do, it will have a draft of 8.9 meters instead of 8.4.... it will need perhaps as much as 10% more engine power to compensate and keep the same mobility.

cost? about 1000$/ton adding 3000 tons equals 3 million in material cost(unit cost at 3.4 billion makes this chump change), and would give about 4cm all over the ship give or take a little, which is twice that of the bradley btw.

Bradley's are notoriously weakly armored as they are not designed for stand-up fights. They can only protect against small arms, even an HMG would do a decent job shredding one. Doubling that means you need an autocannon...or an AP cap on your ASM. 4cm could probably be penetrated by current designs, bump it up to 8 and you might need specially designed missiles with hardened penetrators, but you won't stop them. You'll need significantly more to stop them cold. Useful? Sure, but that's resources better spent on active defenses to prevent the missiles from hitting in the first place because if it hits the superstructure you're losing combat effectiveness of the ship anyway.

Alternately just switch to an ASROC type missile that drops a torpedo into the water that goes under the ship and breaks it's back.
Mr Bojangles wrote:Yes, I know how rangefinders and triangulation work. In fleet actions, I imagine networked sensors would be common. They are in the US Navy. I advocate redundancy as well.
One point about this, when one of the SAM programs was being tested as an ABM they had to adjust the proximity fuses because the closing speed was so high that the bomber-tuned fuses were detonating the SAM far enough behind the target missile that the damage wasn't sufficient. Networked devices may well work, but you risk that quarter-second delay causing you to miss your target. Of course you can beat that by directly slaving missiles on one ship to anothers fire-control, but it's still a concern.

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Re: Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

Post by discord »

Bojangles: yes, they were that heavily armored, just not EQUALLY armored, i have some issues with the idea of this parts needs armor, lots of armor here, the rest? nah, nothing there. which is the case in modern american warships.

the lack of even simple shrapnel armoring is...insane.
small arms will quite easily penetrate modern warships, true, not very deep(amount of compartments penetrated) due to how bullet ballistics work when they hit hard stuff, but still, they bloody well should bounce.

and lowered mass on ships? using advanced light weight materials? why bother!? KISS.

and no, citadel armoring is not really a great idea, what you do instead is a pretty even amount, relatively light, about 1-2cm of ballistic steel armoring, but all over the place, every bulkhead, every compartment, with a double hull spaced armor on the outside for good measure, keeps the armor plate thickness down(ease of both manufacture and construction) but gives a good shrapnel protection and decent chance of stopping or containing ASM hits, it should improve survivability and capability to continue the mission despite taken hits, at a reasonable cost.

the current idea gets the ship pretty gutted but still theoretically functional by a single hit, nothing vital is damaged, like crew which needs to move around in the wreckage....basically this works as long as you go up against 3rd world navies, since you can be reasonably sure they can't hit you, assuming you are prepared to fight, which is not always the case, armor is always on the job.

funny thing, building BB sized armored ships, Iowa style, would actually not be that much different per unit cost compared to 'modern' ships, due to material cost and difficulty to work with those materials....taking the cost of building a Iowa class and take inflation in account gets us 1.6 billion, true other costs have gone up some too, but still comparable to 3.4 billion unit cost of the zumwalt(which admittedly includes R&D, spread over 3 ships.) so price is not the real issue, both are designed to provide fire support for ground units comparable in mission profile,
another funny thing, speed of zumwalt 'in excess of 30kn' speed of iowa 33kn.

fred: just took a arbitrary number for calculation purposes, but i think you might be wrong on penetration, 2+2cm spaced armor(WITH fluid, so it actually works, the bradley has spaced armor without fluid, and it does not work.) is pretty tough actually, and ASM's are designed to penetrate and explode on the inside, since they would do little to no damage exploding outside, not enough boom stuff, so it is a kinetic projectile with dubious penetration capacity we want to stop, might want to go to 2+2+2 layout spaced armor though, no empirical data to say either way however.

under ship torps, if that is such an effective way of sinking ships, why not use it more? and is it really impossible to build a structure capable of handling that force? i think it is possible.

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