Why Were Stealth Ships Invented 70 Years Before Radar?
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- Опубликовано: 30 мар 2023
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✩ABOUT THIS VIDEO✩
In this video, we take a look at why modern stealth ships look like civil war era ironclads. Although both were designed in very different times, they have ended up looking remarkably similar.
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wow 2 out of 7 minutes is ADs.
No thanks
@@seegurke93 Oh noes, the creator has to somehow make a living ... the audacity!
I must admit that the game looks intriguing, but I get the feeling that it's just another "pay to win game". Is that so? Is it one of those game where you can just buy better gear with actual money or is it a game with a fixed price and/or monthly cost and then you have to earn your in game items with actual game progression and playtime?
@@eldsprutandedrake It is free to play. The income they generate mostly comes in two forms: either you buy a premium account (for a set amount of days, so basically the subscription model, but it does not automatically continue to cost you money) to get more "XP" and "money" to progress faster (if you start from scratch and you want to get the newest shiniest vehicle, that can take you a while), or with selling "premium vehicles", that also offer XP and money bonuses. Those premium vehicles can be pretty evil, but do not have to be. For the newest high ranking vehicles it's mostly because they already come with all the availabe modifications while everybody else has to still research those. All can be countered in at least many situations in some way, at least later when you have the knowledge/research necessary.
If you just want to play a few WWII vehicles, the grind is bearable and you can get along very very well without spending a single cent on it.
Explains why no Ironclads were ever spotted on radar during the civil war
Underrated comment 😂
And also why no Zumwalt Class Destroyers were ever damaged by canonballs
RADARS never existed in the 1860s.
🤣
🤣🤣
The battle of hampton roads was almost comical. They shot each other for _literal hours_ without relevant damage, nevermind casualties.
The people watching from shore actually got bored.
Viriginia ran aground for a while, but nothing was made of it.
The Monitor lost it's captain and retreated for a moment.
So Viriginia declared victory and drove off.
Then Monitor came back, found no Virginia and declared victory.
But virginia did spend a month in Drydock afterwards, while monitor stuck around off shore. So it definitely got the worse of the "duel".
How did they lose their captain without casualties?
@@adamcetinkent There was like 3 death and 16 wounded over those several hours.
Every so often a shell did manage to explode. And a few times some spalling paint paint hit someone, somebody leaned against that section of armor as it got hit or some shrapnel went through a port.
Those are laughable numbers given just how many hundreds of shots were fired.
268 men died and two ships were sunk at Hampton roads. It also changed naval warfare forever.
The Monitor was rushed to finish to counter the Virginia with a crew that had never sailed together and an experimental design that hadn't had sea trials.
The Virginia withdrew first but made more sorties into hampton roads for the next two months but the Union blockade was not broken and the Confederacy was eventually forced to scuttle the Virginia when they lost Portsmouth.
The noise and smoke of the duel was the most epic sight of naval warfare thus far, men were being deafened, blinded, hit with splinters, hot shrapnel, and molten iron.
It is a very important part of the history of Naval Warfare and a massive tribute to the sea power of the United States of America today.
My favorite part of the battle was that The Monitor's turret got stuck spinning, so they could only take a shot at the CSS Virginia once every revolution! Lmao I'm surprised nobody got dizzy!
You forgot to mention that the Captain of the CSS _Virginia_ was wounded on March 8th for standing on top of said ironclad and trying to take pot shots at the union shore batteries with his carbine.
very few people talk about ironclads, they're sorta forgotten, being stuck in between world war ships and sailing ships.
just like noone talks about predreadnaughts.
@@burnstick1380 Which is ironic when the single most decisive naval battle between metal ships was fought by predreadnoughts.
@@gargravarr2 tell me more, what is this battle you are talking about I am interested
@@rx6588 The Battle of Tsushima, 1905, which decided the Russo-Japanese War.
Russia had sailed its Baltic fleet of 8 predreadnought battleships and 3 coastal battleships all the way around Eurasia to defeat Japan in the east. Japan, with a fleet of 5 battleships plus a larger supporting force, crushed them in the Tsushima strait between Japan and Korea. They sank 7 Russian battleships and captured the other 4 for the loss of only 3 torpedo boats. Russia sued for peace soon after.
The consequences for naval warfare were far-reaching. The battle had demonstrated that accurate long-range heavy gunfire was the way to win at sea. This ushered in the Dreadnought revolution. Having won the war with a decisive naval battle, Japan's naval doctrine in World War 2 was based on the idea of forcing and winning another decisive clash of fleets - at which they ultimately failed.
@@burnstick1380I’ve never talked about predreadnaughts
Another thing about sloped armor is that the effective thickness is increased relative to perpendicular armor.
I'm not sure if that's useful when shell comes to you at 30+ degree angle from above, as shells going at high parabolic trajectories at the distances of a naval fight.
@Сергей Кленовский You are right in the sense that if the projectile hits at an angle perpendicular to the sloped armour, it acts as if there was no slope. However you can account for this when designing the slope.
@@Mincecroft It is why on latter era battleships that used sloped armor it angled inwards causing arching shells, to hit at even great angles.
I have a better question: Are civil war ironclads stealth?
No radars of the era ever detected them
Paint em blue and maybe you can fool the hot air balloons
With that big round exhaust column? Not a chance.
I'm actually wondering if they could deflect radar scans given their shape.
They'd have to be cleaned up 😄
A point worth mentioning about angling. Another reason to angle surfaces up is to prevent radar signals from bouncing off the water. if hull surfaces are angled down, the hull and the water will also create a cat's eye effect, making it show up more easily on radar. I think you actually mentioned this on a different video (something about flared vs. tumblehome bows if I recall). That's why aircraft carriers don't really bother with any radar dampening features the way destroyers do. The most important feature of an aircraft carrier is deck space, because it directly effects how many planes you can carry and how fast they can deploy. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are smaller carrier/destroyer hybrids used by small navy's or for clandestine opps rather than large scale deployments. Making something like a nimitz class carrier "stealthy" would require a ship with such a wide hull at the water line that it would be impractically slow and difficult to maneuver missed
You can absolutely make carriers more stealthy. The US has decided not to do it with their newest class. But the UK has. Just compare a few pictures of the British Queen Elisabeth class carriers to the US General R. Ford class carrier.
It is quite clear that the Royal Navy tried to make the QE a bit more stealthy, as they have a ton of flat angled surfaces, and they have hidden the irregular stuff that shows up big on radar as much as possible. Yes many of those flat surfaces are angled towards the water, because otherwise the compromise for the carrier functions would be too much. However that is still much better and more stealthy than not having those angled surfaces at all. A little bit of stealth is better than no stealth.
Of course a carrier will never reach the same values as a destroyer, but as will all stealth things it is not about being invisible, it is about being detected later. It does make a big difference in strategic positioning and tactical defense weather you are detected at 300km or 400km distance. Might not look like a lot but in this case that is 70600 km² vs 125600 km² of detection area, so the ship with 300km detection range occupies 56% less area where it is detected compared to the ship with 400km.
Well, actually, aircraft do bother with radar dampening features. F-35 and F-22 have iconic nose lines that have been purposed placed there to bounce radar signatures away from the source
@@tandemcharge5114aircraft carriers my dude
With the massive amount of satellite surveillance, slow moving ships are easily spotted and tracked irrespective to their radar stealth. But even if we know where a stealth destroyer is, radar guided anti-ship missiles will struggle to find that target.
That was part of the rationale behind LRASM. It doesn't rely on any single targeting mechanism. We know where the enemy ship is and we can provide continuous guidance to the missile during its flight. When it has reached that general area it doesn't need radar, a camera with relatively simple recognition systems will hit the target. It has many other mechanisms that achieve the same aim that don't require radar.
it's not just that sloped surfaces deflect things, but often it has more to do with the fact that it sort of makes things "thicker", because of trigonometry. while i could definitely see it doing more deflecting back in olden days when the force of projectiles were much smaller, deflection becomes harder as you get cannons that fire faster, heavier shells.
Well that's the usual explanation I've heard, that you can get away with thinner armour, but now you'd have to use more armour since it's sloped, so it's not necessarily lighter
TLDR: sloped surfaces deflect things
I'd love to have seen the battle between the Monitor and Virginia. I think I read somewhere that the battle went on so long with nothing happening that site see'ers started to go home lol. Don't know if that's true, or who the source was.
"Sightseers". You truly mangled that word.
It was the battle of hampton Roads, and when the 2 ironclads fought it was like 2 people in armor trying to hurt each other with sticks
I love the technology of the Civil War. And the ironclads are one of if not the most impressive things to come out of the war. Before the Monitor arrived, the Virginia had the run of the harbor and sunk /caused the retreat of 3 wooden vessels. That day signaled the end of the wooden warship and made the naval fleets of all other nations obsolete overnight.
Civil War was the free preview of the world wars as well, Being maybe the biggest industrial war before the world wars
Also keep in mind that angling the armor increases the thickness when impacting at an angle!
The Merrimac was in dry dock when she was burned which made salvage much easier.
That dry dock is is Dry Dock #1 at Norfolk Naval Ship Yard and it is still in service.
Fascinating! Congrats on the growth of this channel, up over 500k now!😎🔥🙌
Deflecting cannon balls and deflecting radar energy is eerily the same.
As always, Your continuing producing great episodes is what keeps me coming back, (and you say that keeps the channel going - win-win-win!)
Thanks for your efforts.
I feel like the iron clads as depicted here is more like u-boats or submarines in that they move everything they can as low as they can. The Monitor is a good example as the round tower translates into a sail or conning's tower.
Do stealthy ships also do similar things below the water line to avoid sonar? Or does sonar not work that close to surface?
I dont know, but i think they do it below water also
Might be a good idea to put the 5 criteria of how well ships reflect as a word onto the screen while you are explaining each one
One thing I always wondered, do warships designed to minimize radar return carry radar reflectors they can deploy during peacetime? It seems like it'd be a good idea, and it's just kinda funny to engineer in both directions at once.
I'll be the first to take a guess and say : No. For navigational purposes there is still some radar return so while they may be lost on a 24 mile scale on radar they will be apparent when they are within 12 or so miles. Within 12 miles in clear weather the navigation lights will be visible. Also once the stealth ship sees another vessel on their radar or visually there is radio communications as well as electronic identification, AIS. However if you are in a war zone just keep a sharp lookout since there will be no AIS and no nav lights .
Literally the backbone of my Soviet coastal fleet in war thunder is consisted of ironclad river boats (currently the Pr. 1124 late and Pr. 191). Fun times having to sail in choppy water with no stabilizers on my main guns ;-;
Another thought: If those stealth ships ever got close enough, maybe they could consider ramming the enemy ship? We're all too familiar with the destructive power of those chisel shaped bows...
Unless a ship or vehicle is especially designed for ramming (eg ancient galleys), ramming is never the answer. Way too risky.
From a performance perspective, there are big advantages to keeping a ship low, especially with weaker, less efficient steam engines. Also weight up high in ships is bad, so keeping heavy armour as low as possible is good. Also sloping the sides in reduces the width of the heavy deck, and is good for seakeeping as well.
Another awesome video. Glad you are getting some sponsors too.
Love the cannon animation, never expected there to be very fitting metallic clunking sounds with the cannon shells.
I guess we can say it is this attention to detail that have made your channel so special.
Maybe military ships should be built more like nacro subs.
Low profile semi submersible combined with stealth materials.
Making it close to invisible to radar.
another related parallel: Sloped walls of Japanese and European fortresses. Vauban forts in Europe had sloped sides to deflect cannon fire. Japan did not use much heavy artillery, but their castle walls are sloped, but in their case it was to provide better stability against earthquakes.
The Zumwalt is one of a kind that is designed like that
First thought - 'hey, that's Warrior!' I mean, I see her across the harbour every day anyway, but still...that's a fantastic digital likeness of the old girl!
Loved this! Best I've seen! 👍
Very interesting as usual.
Thanks for sharing and take care of yourself.
The guys from USS New Jersey did a video on all those antennas on warships, comparing Iowa and USS Hornet in this regard. I wonder how stealth ships go about some connections they do need
This might not be a full answer, but IIRC most modern ships use phased array radar rather than traditional rotating-antenna radar. Instead of having large antennas pointing at things, they use a large array of small omnidirectional sensors, and the direction of incoming radio waves is measured by the slight differences in timing. A similar same method is used for sending pulses of radio waves. That eliminates a lot of large antennas that old warships had (e.g. for battleships: surface search radar, air search radar, fire control radars (both for primary, secondary and AA fire control directors)).
Unfortunately I don't know if communication antennas use similar techniques, but looking at photos of some modern stealth ships, a lot of them feature "traditional" antennas or large white spheres which hide antennas underneath.
@@wojtek4p4 Many types of antenna for different wavelengths now use that phased array structure, even those for SATCOM or UHF radio. I don't know if the long antennas of SW radios can be replaced like this though.
Thank you for using her correct name of CSS Virginia
I knew the answer and still watched the entire video. Says a lot about your great channel. Always looking forward to your great explanations about maritime related topics :)
Do stealth ships raise a radar reflector when they're in locations where lots of other ships are operating and the risk of collision is greater? For example, when docking at a busy port.
Yes. Unless it is wartime they pretty much always have radar reflectors equipped. Not only for safetly around civilian vessels but also to hide their true radar signature from vessels of rivaling nations. The same goes for stealth planes
@@xxnightdriverxx9576 Awesome. Thanks for that.
This is one of the few things i already knew, befor waching one of your Videos :O
Grad job, as always
Step 1: fool enemies by building USS Zumwalt.
Step 2: enemies build fleet of monitors to counter.
Step 3: nail 'em with Harpoons and F-18s from 70 miles away.
Size is not directly related to radar crossection but a bigger vessel has of course more rough spots, round surfaces and corners to reflect radar energy back.
Union Captain: “We’re burning down the Merrimack so the Rebels can’t use it!”
Confederates: “Oh no! Anyway…”
If my knowledge is correct, the tumblehome hull shape - subject of discussion here - also have disadvantageous seakeeping properties, the reason why it wasn't prevalent in WW2(or modern civilian ships, for that matter).
Being detected in modern warfare is so deadly that it is an acceptable tradeoff, even if the warships have to employ other design features to reinforce stability.
The main disadvantage of the tumblehome was instability if flooded. Three Russian tumblehome battleships sinking at Tsushima in 1905 made navies stop building them. In 1915, the French tumblehome predreadnought Bouvet capsized and sank in two minutes after hitting a mine during the Dardanelles campaign.
This tumblehome design is only used by a single ship class. The US Zumwalt class of 3 ships, as shown in the video. ALL other modern warships use more traditional hull shapes. Even the next generation of US destroyer/cruiser, the DDG (X), which is still in the design phase, will use a traditional hull. The tradeoffs are simply not worth it, even when you try to make the ships as stealthy as possible, as the US Navy has realized (again).
You correctly said "fired from nearby vessels", as the range at which warships engaged increased the shells could hit at at much steeper angle making angled armour lose its advantage, apart from its effect on seakeeping.
Great video
Clicked instantly, dont want to miss a video!
You got the way armor works against High Explosive wrong. It does not deflect it necessarily (though it can.) The angle increases the effective thickness of the armor based on the cosign of the angle of the armor divided into the the thickness. So 10mm plate angled at 45 degrees has an effective line of sight thickness of 14.14 mm. Great channel and I rarely find a mistake, but this is one. EDIT: Thanks to everyone pointing out my error. Sloped armor only helps with penetration of kinetic rounds.
Penetration only deals with objects. The pressure wave from HE will reflect
Isn't that the way it works for penetrating rounds, not high explosive? For high explosive, as the force of the explosion is what's getting through the armor the angle doesn't matter. The explosion pushes in all directions equally and so part of it will always be pushing perpendicular to the armor. There is no line-of-sight advantage against explosive because the explosion's 'line-of-sight' is in all directions, right next to the armor plate.
the pressure wave doesn't care about effective thickness. It does not care about angle its basically a sphere.
Oh and thick armour doesn't always help because explosions may cause splinters on the inside. Basically the armour isn't penetrated but on the inside parts of the armour splinters of and well hurts, kills, damages and destroys interior things
@@KingTFD No explosions go in spheres
@@burnstick1380 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷
I have a soft spot for these majestic buildings, these are essence of the sea. I would give much to play light keeper for a month or two. Thanks for a video
You forgot to mention that angled armor also has a higher effective thickness than the actual thickness of the plating.
the monitor was only firing 30 lb charges of black powder the guns she had was able to fire 60 lb charges but the military was scared the guns would blow up if 60 labs was used things would of been MUCH different during the battle
And the angled sheet makes the sheet itself thicker in regard of a obrject penetrating it in a straight line.
3:10 *again you forgot to mention* the EFFECTIVE THICKNESS GROWS... its not just the angle but the amount of steel it has to dig through grows.... (aka thicker profile)
It's not the thickness but how you use it, that's what I always say
That depends on the kind of shell that hits the armour; if it's an armour piercing round (HEAT, APDS, APFSDS, whatever), then sure, but if it's something like a purely explosive warhead, there's a lot less care about that whole "effective thickness" as the explosion would be unidirectional and hit the armour about as much regardless of the angle.
QM2 makes it into another video - nice!
1:00 design of this union ship,
2:15 angled armor
3:35 design of another
4:20 defecting radar
4:50 normal ships defecting
literally playing warthunder with this in the bg. spooky
Can you explained video of “ship’s propeller and water jet thruster”.
Subs are the true stealthy vessels u don’t know they are there until u get sunk lol
It took a while for the tanks to get sloped armour, that is quite interesting IMHO.
They also are doing a new event in April where you can play as amoured mechs... Yeah I know...
If I remember correctly, some ironclad's armor was made of train tracks they had around. That shape would've worked as a sort of radar reflector not making the ship stealthy.
Can you make a video about the Monitor Huscar?
Surely roading sound barriers could benefit from the same concepts to break up noise
Yes then you’ll see similar things in tanks around ww2 for example russian t34 hulls were angled to help deflect shots and increase the effective thickness of the armor plates by having to go through more material
War thunder added the killer egg? Guess I'm gonna start playing it now
Mayhaps give a shout out to Drachinifel, who did a *very* good overview of the ironclads.
Yea, those turn of the century ironclads were so stealthy, they were completely invisible to radar! We can’t even imagine!
It would take radar all the way to the 1930’s to detect these slow ironclads.
You mean halfway between two turns of centuries?
Tumblehome hulls come and go every few centuries, it seems.
Perhaps they should have named one of the ironclads "The Alabi." Or possibly not.
angle of incidecence = angle of deflection. useful bite of physics:)
Thank you for the interessting Video!
One question: Why is the F35 stealth bomber from USA than everywhere curved?
You mean the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, the stealth 5th gen multi-role fighter?
Because the "stealth" evolved. Look for example at F-117 Nighthawk, the surface was all made from straight "panels".
It is a group of technologies working together in order to lower the radar detection. Using surface shape to deflect the light (radar wave) is one "technology" in this group, another can be for example absorbing the light (by using specialiazed materials and coatings). Surface has to be still aerodynamic, especially of quick-moving and maneuvring fighter jet. Nighthawk was a rather light-weight carrying bomber, thus the high-speed and maneuverability was not required nor achieved.
Please make a video about the SS America
USS Zumwalt, Lead ship of the Zumwalt-class destroyer
It's all : Different purposes leading to similar shapes.
I think the iron clad ships were the granddaddy to battle ships the share similar traits
2:01 the elevon movement is greatly exaggerated and not in time with the aircraft roll - that much deflection would give a 300' per second roll in a plane like that.
So why do people think that the sloped armor of the CSS Virginia had ANYTHING to do with stealth when radar wouldn't be invented until almost 75 years later? Actually it had everything to do with the stability of the vessel and sloped armor deflecting shot better.
It's all about the bounce.
So, the design still works because it's for helping repel projectiles. They just went from physical projectiles to electronic ones.
Could have used a prettier ship as an example though. Like the Type 055.
Ironclad vs F22 raptor pls
No it copies the Visby klass corvette
Whoo!
they deflect cannon fire and radar upwards, same principle different purpose.
Convergent evolution, not coincidence.
1.5 minute ad on a 7 minute video in addition to the ads youtube spams. Cmon
The Virginia got its iron from a bunch of railroad tracks, right?
Ironclad stealth
I wish I started warthunder through these links. But no. I’m even better than the bonuses
Do they?
Wait War Thunder is a video game??? This whole time I thought they were a classified documents dump. Oops
can anyone explain why ships hull is sometimes wrinkled and ugly?
ironchads
Federalist?
Those confederates were so ahead of their time, already thought about radar reflection before it was even invented.
I respectfully disagree with the name of the video, good video as always though.
Because bad then we had LIDAR
The video in your ad is way too long.
so the ironclads where the first stealth thing we ever build ?😅😅😅
Ironclad? They look more like those dreadnought battleships…
Very helpful Video.... Well, my comment is: a 60 degrees angle is the best against every attacing munition, even beams, .... and if you go by warship vessle and you have the possibility of being not dectetd by the enemy, use whale sounds for irritation and to call our animal friends.... hallo whale.... ;)
160 years as “ancient” feels pretty clickbait
T 34 in sea
re the stealth ship. why is the metal skin better?
Ah yes, the ancient United States Navy, oldest in the world 🤌🇺🇸