The Best Torpedo Defense On a Battleship
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- Опубликовано: 14 окт 2024
- In this episode we're talking about torpedo defense systems used on ships.
For our previous video on tank sounding: • Is That Ship Listing? ...
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The best torpedo defense for WW2 is to ensure your opponent is using the Mark 14 Torpedo. Unfortunately, the Japanese had that.
true, but catty
The Japanese lost 1,300 merchant ships and 200 warships to US submarines.
@@Ron52G what percentage of those were before 1944?
Yeah. Immediately after the war, Japan should’ve given medals to everybody in BuOrd.
Yeah agree, make sure the Germans, Japanese and Italians use the mark 14, but would also add that the allies have exclusive use of the (Japanese) type 93 long lance.
Ryan's explanation of how a modern under keel explosion breaks the back of a warship is also a good description of how a depth charge sinks a submarine. The depth charge explosion creates a hole in the ocean that over flexes the hull of the submarine, even if the original explosion didn't impact it directly. The explosion will rebound in and out as it surfaces, so even if the depth was set too deep, it can still kill the submarine as it "floats by" towards the surface. In movies, the huge surface explosion is actually caused then the depth charge is set too shallow, and the initial explosion breaches the surface immediately. Looks cool, but wastes the power of the explosion.
Yes, although you’d need a really massive torpedo to actually break the keel of a battleship. Sure, you’d blow a big hole in the bottom, but a battleship keel is much more massive and rigid than the average ship. The ship’s sheer size and belt armor also give it a lot of longitudinal rigidity. The length and beam of the ship also mean that the void created by the explosion is much smaller relative to the ship, and therefore there is less pressure on the keel.
Former IJN admirals also said they were surprised at how easily USN torpedoes were defeating their TDS in the latter half of the war, and only after the war they realized that it was due to the USN upgrading the torpedo warheads with Torpex which contained aluminum that greatly magnified the power of the detonation.
And after BuWeps admitted that the Mark 14 was filled with problems.
I'm curious to know what their response was when the US actually started deploying torpedoes that worked. Was it gradual enough that they didn't really notice?
@@stuartdilts2729 My guess is exactly this. Torpedoes are expensive and slow to produce. You can almost never produce enough to meet wartime needs. On top of that ships go out on patrol and take quite a long time to come back and get reloaded. And then you have all this old stock. So my guess is that it took quite some time for the fixes to propagate through the shipyards and then get into the ships.
@@stuartdilts2729
❓ It depends on your personal definition of the word "gradual". One day in late 1943, a Japanese crew spotted a USN sub, and just minutes later, they heard a metallic bang against their hull, but with absolutely no other negative effects. Four weeks later in early 1944, the same crew once again spotted another USN sub, and just a few minutes later, the Japanese crew experienced 1/1,000th of a second of a catastrophic explosion, before ceasing to exist.
So, yes, I'd personally call that a dictionary-perfect example of "gradual".
Can you give me some sources on this? I am very interested in the effects of the different explosives on the performance of warheads and weapons.
Drachinfel did a great piece on warship armor through the years. HOWEVER, it is nice to see inside Big J's armor.
The fact is for every person in charge of designing a better torpedo defense, there is someone else designing a better torpedo.
The US Navy also underestimated the size of the explosive warhead of the Japanese Long Lance torpedo.
The USN really underestimated the speed and range of the Type 93 Long Lance. The IJN underestimated how freaking dangerous they were to have on your ship. See the Chokai or Mikuma.
Yeah, but they still need to make new Torpedo's. They are VERY expensive. Also a good defense renders either obsolete or significantly less effective old Torpedo's. Some Navies are too poor to do that.
@@brokeandtired That might be but is it a continual unending game of modifications.
@@charliedontsurf334 Having a tank full of liquid oxygen someplace where it can be exposed to fire is never a good idea.
This video gives a glimpse of how complex maintaining or mothballing a battleship is. Keeping one in action.....I can't get my head around it!
The enormous size of Yamato and Musashi would have to take the cake, even though the armor joint was their undoing. However, what other ship could take that punishment? As far as a more normal ship the French Richelieu class had the deepest protection, combined with the ebonite mousse that was packed it the voids. So I’d give the edge to them
actually Yamato class TDS was not that deep. Despite their sheer width their TDS depth was less than a north carlina's, and this is due to the lower efficiency boilers used by the Yamato's forcing the designers to put the boilers four abreast. As such this Gave the Yamatos very wide engine rooms, which limited the depth of their TDS.
What kept both ships afloat for as long as they did despite the weaknesses of their torpedo defenses was their excellent internal subdivision as well as just being very very big. Very large ships like that can just simply take a long time to sink.
I believe that was chocolate mousse but could be mistaken……
@@richardhaynes6934 😂
ebonite mousse? I tried looking that up and it gave me “hard rubber”.
Did the French put _rubber_ in the voids for their TDS?
@@magiccarpetmadeofsteel4564 rubber foam basically
Drach just did a video today (Feb 8), of the torpedo hit on the North Carolina, interviewing a rear admiral, who's studied it. The North Carolina's defense, held up quite well, against a Japanese type 95 torpedo. The ship managed to stay a speed, and suffered little extra damage while at speed. That's more than you can say about the Bismarck suffering a smaller hit to its bow.
He also noted that the Japanese torpedo had a much larger warhead than the USN had designed against, yet the TDS still held up, even the thinner portion forward.
The Bismarck was hit by a 14in shell, not a torpedo, which tells you a lot about that ship...
@@sskuk1095 The 14” shell you’re referring to was an underwater hit that exploded against the torpedo bulkhead. Passing through water robs a shell of most of its velocity and penetrating power. They can penetrate hull playing and thinner bulkhead plates, but can’t get through the main bulkhead. And if they can’t penetrate that bulkhead, then the 50 pounds or so of explosive they carry isn’t going to do much damage. In contrast, the torpedo that hit the NC carried almost 1,000 pounds of explosive. There’s really no comparison between the power of those explosions. Bismarck did have a relatively effective TDS, but only because it was very deep. The design was actually very simple and would not have worked well on a narrower ship.
Montana was not following the TDS used on both SoDak or Iowa. Montana was to use the tried and true TDS on North Carolina.
While North Carolina TDS nearly failed, it DID hold while being hit at the weakest possible point on that system (by the forward most turret where the system is very narrow) by a weapon that exceeded its intended design parameters.
Makes sense.
Rinzler . Drach put up a Video today 2/8/23 about the Torpedo Attack on North Carolina . You might enjoy it .
Cool! Thanks.
It actually didn’t use either. The Montana would have had an external belt and torpedo bulge like the NCs, but also had an internal lower belt like the Iowas and SoDaks to protect from underwater shell hits. However, the lower belt wasn’t connected to the upper belt as it was in the Iowas and SoDaks, so it was more free to deform and absorb the explosion of a torpedo. An extra 10’ of depth on either side of the TDS didn’t hurt either.
What was really notable was the number of WW1 battleships sunk by a single mine or torpedo. By WW2, ships were more survivable.
A point Ryan’s explanation elided: not all armor is better with one thick plate as opposed to many small plates. This is specifically true with shaped charges, most often seen in anti-tank armaments. This is because the effectiveness of a shaped charge is based on the focal length of the charge, which functions like a magnifying glass does with sunlight but instead using an explosive to shape a slug of (usually) copper into a jet of hyper velocity molten metal. This can be defeated by having a sacrificial plate which detonates the shaped charge (much like how the New Jersey has an external shell plate intended to de-cap incoming shells causing them to detonate against the external armor before it penetrates) followed by heavier armor intended to defeat the dissipating jet of molten metal - often by sloping the interior armor as well, redirecting the dissipating jet.
Dreadnought-era battleships did have the equivalent of slat armor in port, they had chains/nets on booms that could be swung out from the sides to predetonate torpedoes.
It's true that single solid plate is better for his case, though, where it's all basically KE penetrators (a 2700-pound 16" AP shell has like 45lb/20-ish kg of explosive inside, just to splinter the case once it's forced its way through the armor through F=MV^2), Chobham armor hadn't been invented yet, and shaped charges were in their infancy. Now I'm imagining battleships with 16" HEAT warheads and ceramic armor. Although I'm not sure the ceramic-filled Chobham-type armor would hold up to 16" AP, the way it works is by the shattered ceramic middle bit grinding the pencil-shaped shot* a tank fires away before it can get to the inner plate.
*In artillery, shot = solid metal, shell = explodey filling, so by analogy, standard hard-candy lollipop vs. Tootsie Pop, with the Tootsie Roll center being the bit in the artillery shell that goes boom. The Mk 8 superheavy shell was like a regular lollipop with the stick vaguely chocolate-flavored.
While having several layers of defense is good, I believe what Ryan was referring to was that, for a *_single_* armor plate, aka one part of that multi-layered defense system, one single 12-inch plate is better than two 6-inch plates, or 12 1-inch plates. This probably isn’t particularly relevant by the 1930s, but certain nations lacking the industrial capacity to produce foot thick steel plates for warships was a thing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Not gonna lie, I glanced at the thumbnail, thought it was Drach, and only once it was a few minutes in I realized that this wasn't Drach's footage from his earlier or current US trip. Not that I regret clicking, very nice and informative video. :)
USS Pennsylvania proved the best torpedo defense is to be in drydock when torps are in the water.
trick only worked once though
Johnny Carson's ship.
But then don't let them put a few other ships in there with you, especially not ones with stuff in the magazines...
Another great video from the battleship. Keep it going
Are you sure?
I like that you take an active role in maintaining our girl. Curators in most museums means a paper pusher, but you get grubby and enjoy doing it.
I wish Mike Rowe still did dirty jobs, the Big J would be perfect for him.
That was another great episode thank you. I do have a question.What about doing an episode on how the recoil system on the 16in in 5-inch guns?
Love how he isnt afraid to get dirty.
Ryan, I read somewhere that the science of steel making evolved considerably after WW-2. Not just in efficiency, but also in the strength and resilience of the material. Factor in also the use of plastic explosives, in reactive armor, as seen in tanks. If, you were given a cheque for $ 12 billion, to build a battleship today, what could you describe, in those terms, and also for the armament ? I realize that's somewhat of a project, but it maybe an interesting idea for a series,,,
They plundered tons of tech from Germany after the war. Even during the war they had captured downed German planes and they couldn't figure out how the Germans made them.
Somewhere I saw an image of an M-1 Abrams APFSDS round poking right through 17 inches of rolled homogenous steel armor. The gun that shoots it is 120mm diameter and after the sabot falls off you have a 45mm diameter depleted uranium spike with fins on the back, and it would defeat the armor on an Iowa class.
Something like a modern BROACH warhead will defeat any armoring scheme that would float. That warhead can penetrate a meter or more of steel reinforced concrete that is under a similar depth of dirt. They blow buried bunkers and other hardened targets. You find BROACH warheads on missiles like Storm Shadow, JASSM/JASSM-ER/JASSM-XR, LRASM and JSOW-C1 to name a few.
A related question is how do they protect their propellers and rudders? The mention of Bismarck brings this to mind, given it was a torpedo hit to the stern that doomed her.
PoW was sunk by a single 18" torpedoe that hit the port side propeller shaft, the 3 extra torpedoes on the starebord side just slowed down the sinking, by an hour or so, she capsized to the port ! Her 15" inch armour belt did not do shit to save the ship.
The USS South Dakota (BB 57) class addressed this somewhat by placing the two prop shaft skegs outboard rather than close to the centerline of the ship as the Iowa class does. This offered some protection to the outboard shafts that none of the other BB classes had, and the inboard shafts were in the "tunnel" between the skegs. The rudder though was still out in the open.
@@robertf3479 I thought I read somewhere the US ships had ways of removing the rudder if damaged and use propellers to steer the ship, while the Bismark did not have a way to get rid of the rudder.
@@peterpeek4831 I have a book on the subject (Battleship Bismarck: A Design and Operational History, Garzke/Dulin/Jurens) which says that even on trials in relatively calm waters with rudders amidships, she didn't respond well to steering using the propellers.
@@peterpeek4831 If there is a way to "remove" or jettison a damaged rudder while at sea I was never told about it.
Yes, multi-engine ships can maneuver using engines only, at low speeds and assuming the rudder isn't jammed more than a few degrees off center or that there isn't anything else to induce a turn like wreckage hanging over the side. Some also have bow thrusters to help hold position during boat launching / recovery operations.
The British used the HMS Hood predecessor ship, a Royal Sovereign Class Pre-Dreadnought Battleship to test new torpedo defense system
“You sank my battleship!” - said no one ever assigned to an Iowa 😎
That coming from you, though...
Well in an alternative history timeline, the 6 Iowa Class were failures and sunk as target ships by the Montana Class Battleship
These are those TL Iowas
APNS Commune of Des Moines (BB-61) - OTL USS Iowa (BB-61)
APNS Commune of Newark (BB-62) - OTL USS New Jersey (BB-62)
ANPS Commune of Paris (BB-63) - OTL USS Missouri (BB-63)
APNS Commune of Milwaukee (BB-64) - OTL USS Wisconsin (BB-64)
APNS Commune of Chicago (BB-65) - OTL USS Illinois (BB-65)
APNS Commune of Winchester (BB-66) - OTL USS Kentucky (BB-66)
Yeah in that alternative timeline, the communist party of the USA got powerful enough to start a 2nd American Civil War which the US loses and gets turned into the Union of American People's Republic
Oh yeah, that.TL's BB-63 is lost to catastrophic fuel fire
@@Knight6831 what?
Trick is to be as far from an ocean as Iowa is.
I think you need to look at two sides of the question: not only what anti-torpedo system the battleship had, but how big a warhead was launched against it. I think Yamato class BB's took the most hits before sinking, but they were hit by air launched torpedoes that were usually lighter than those carried by surface ships or submarines. In principle I like the idea of making a path to atmosphere for the expanding gases in the space between the side shell and the holding bulkhead. When I visited the Massachusetts I saw the row of inspection ports along the side slightly below the sheer and I thought that's what they were, but I wasn't able to confirm that in the sources.
Depth and subdivision are everything. Ideally you wanted to create a deep void space that is heavily laterally subdivided and runs under the ship. This allows the flooding to spread across the ship to prevent listing. The US knew this but the weight/size of its battleships (even the iowas) were constrained by treaty among other things so they had to work within those limits. Yamato was not.
@@navyreviewer But interestingly, the Iowas and SoDaks had a deeper TDS than the Yamatos did due to their more efficient machinery taking up less space. They did have a potential weak spot in the connection between the lower belt/torpedo bulkhead and the triple bottom, but this would have only caused problems low in the ship where the flooding could be contained. The Yamatos’ weak spot was the connection between the upper and lower belts, and a hit there would have allowed water to pour in relatively high in the ship.
South Dakota-class BBs probably had the best TD architecture. Their armor belt was inside the ship and sloped. It was continuous from the top of the citadel down to the double bottom and it did triple service - it was an armor belt, it was structure, and it also formed the torpedo bulkhead.
And the engine rooms were much smaller than the Iowas, since they had less speed, so there was more space outboard for TDS.
@@gregorywright4918 Man, I hate to nit-pick, but there really is no connection between her speed, her machinery and the depth of her TD system. SD-class ships had the exact same beam as the NC-class that preceded and the Iowa-class that followed. They had the exact same machinery as the NC-class but it was arranged more efficiently. But the real issue there was not the beam, it was the length of the hull. As stated, they had the exact same beam as the NC-class. As far as the depth of the TD system, the NCs, the SDs, and the Iowas all had systems of similar depth. It was the internal belt that also formed the torpedo bulkhead that made the SDs better protected.
I would love to see good videos of the framing and welding. I have built a lot of aluminum boats and done a bit of steel shipbuilding and later moved into different types of land based construction. I found it really interesting how different code committee's ha e different views on what is ideal with some preferences being defective by another standard. I would find it interesting to see what the welding was like on a full warship when welding was still pretty new and what if anything has changed.
The US is very secretive about its hull construction techniques, especially, for its carriers. That's part of the reason you wont see any super carrier museums.
The effectiveness of under the keel explosions was well understood by the interwar years. That is why the Royal Navy, the US Navy and the Kriegsmarine developed magnetic exploders, none of which worked. The Japanese went for a big warhead instead.
The Yamato probably had the best designed torpedo defense system. However, it was apparently poorly built and prone to failure.
I dunno about that. The Yamato and Musashi took more torpedo and bomb damage than any other ships in history that I'm aware of. If I'm wrong, name a ship that took more torpedo hits and stayed a float.
Their calculations, while good and thorough, were based on a TNT-like explosive, but during the war the Allies unexpectedly (to the Germans and Japanese of course) switched to Torpex, which is 50% more powerful than TNT.
I've also heard Drachinfel say there was a poorly designed and constructed joint between the armored belt and the torpedo bulkhead that was to rigid so any flexing could tear a hole between the two.
The yamato was torpedoed on both sides. So instead of capsizing the US caused flooding, and then counter flooded their last hit.
@@MartyInLa What are you talking about..? He's commenting about the speculations of the design, not what had actually happened..?
@@MartyInLa They were the size of a supercarrier so what do you expect?
If you had to pick a ship it probably was the Yamato class BBs. The Yamato took close to a dozen torpedos and Musashi by almost 20. Size had its advantage for sure.
Musashi took so many because they were hitting both sides, which acted like counterflooding. They wised up with Yamato and deliberately hit her on only one side. Realize also that those were 17" airborne torpedoes, not the 21" sub versions or the 24" Long Lances.
The Torpedo defense itself was not that great, but the ships had a lot of bulkhead subdivision and were just enormous, so sinking it takes quite a lot of abuse
What's also interesting is that while between-war naval architects were trying to defend against side contact hits, torpedo designers were trying to perfect the underhull influence detonators that would have made the bulges useless. Obviously, the influence detonators have since been perfected.
The Hood's crushing tubes were probably a good idea in the 1920s but by the 1930s probably not but as far as I know, the British planned to remove the crush tubes and convert the space in the buoyancy space into fuel tanks
Do anyone know what TDS the Renown and QE rebuild used?
Great presentation
You're definitely bringing up some good points. I've heard very little of how ships survive battles. Maybe you could start a series on what they do, closing doors, pumping, aux systems, fire fighting, intentionally flooding. Britain welded together a boat with a blown off bow with a ship with a missing stern. THAT IS A STORY!
7:04 This is also because of splinters. By having the outer layers made up of thin plating, any splinters created by a torpedo will be smaller and will be better resisted by the thicker, inner bulkhead.
Good lookouts and a fast hand on the wheel. Steer parallel to the torpedo track.
My candidate for the best TDS would probably be that of the Nelson class (predicded to be proof agains an 800 pound warhead, shown in full scale testing to be proof against a 1000lb warhead). Technically speaking it should probably be that of the later ships which used a derivative of it, but I'm not entirely comfortable of the way that their armoured belts and deck encase the TDS (and there's also a fact that the lower edge of the belt is potentially a source of splinters if a torpedo hits higher than it would in normal conditions).
Excellent episode! Thanks!
For modern torpedoes maybe a triangulated keel beam would work better then the "I" beam conventionally used, would be cool to see some testing on different designs.
I think that the mass of steel you would have to use to make any keel survive (even barely) a modern torpedo is too much for ships to be able to obtain any real speed. The mk. 48 uses 647lb of high explosive, that will literally lift a up a 7000 ton destroyer.
@@rangerhalt I think the best defense against modern torps would be a blast chimney, like a few personel carrier concepts have against landmines/IEDs. Creating a path of least resistance to divert the energy of the explosion safely away instead of trying to take it head on. It would still need very strong framing, and means there's a large vertical void in the middle of the ship, which is inefficient use of space.
Hmm, a lot of torpedoes now are propeller hunting and can be set to go off where you like. Bow and stern hits are nasty for a ship, amidships, even one that cracks the keel, tends to take time to sink. Bow and stern are often 2 minutes or under to sink.
You can still set them to do it though. One note is sea mines, they may not be fast enough to do more than intercept, thus keel is suitable.
Modern torpedos will detonate exactly where you don't want them to, and the warheads do deeply unpleasant things to maximise damage. They don't just go 'BANG.' It's hard to convey just how much more devastating a modern torpedo is than a WW2 model. It's a completely different class of weapon.
WWII battleship would have no issue with modern torpedoes.
I remember someone saying 'can you imagine if a navy actually had the Bismark and Tirpitz at the same time? that would have been unstoppable!' and I was like yeah I can imagine. the US had 4 Iowa class battleships and each better than those 2 ships.
The French had a very interesting system for the Richelieu: they had four spaces, with the two innermost liquid loaded, the next space void, and the outer most was filled with a rubber foam. Now whether this foam could absorb the explosion's energy is up to debate (highly unlikely), but the French were more focused on the aftermath of the explosion. In essence, the rubber foam was there to reduce flooding by denying the water a space to fill, as well as acting as additional buoyancy.
As the full size system was never hit with a torpedo we unfortunately don't know how well it would have worked at stopping one, but it does rate favorably in post hit damage control.
The Americans did have magnetic detonators for the Mark 14 torpedo. Unfortunately they only worked in Long Island Sound off of Connecticut where they were tested. Strangely enough, the Earth's magnetic field differed mightily elsewhere, especially in the South Pacific.
Also, the problem with fuel, water, or ballast tanks is at some point they may be empty as fuel is used or ballast is shifted as needed.
You can always counter-ballast with seawater when a tank is emptied. I think oil can be topped off with seawater at the same time, as they will not mix, but not fresh water. Environmental reasons put an end to mixing in tanks.
I like the way the Iowa Class can vent all of its steam pressure in a short burst to leap out of the water and over any torpedoes.
Skip a rope
Huh?
But Yamato can lift off and bombard enemies from space!
@@treyhelms5282 soooo, your saying she blazed a path the the stars?
German and US (Mark 14) torpedos were also designed to be set to pass below ships and explode underneath, as you explain is true for modern torpedos. Unfortunately, the magnetic pistols of both country's torpedos were unreliable. The Germans (as I understand it) had reliable contact pistols but of course the Mark 14 did not, a double whammy.
But the principle was understood back in the 1930s.
The magnetic mines used by the Germans had the same effect and led to the large-scale demagnetizing efforts by the Brits and Yanks.
The best torpedo defense is not being hit.
My thought before watching the video - The best torpedo defense a ship can have is being capable of destroying the ship, submarine, or aircraft attempting to launch a torpedo against that ship. That defense even works against modern torpedoes.
33kn+ sure helps with that.
……and chocolate mousse…..
Yes, now you may not be lucky enough to destroy the launching platform, but there is a reason the Nixie existed, the Russians throw submarine style counter measures overboard to distract an incoming torpedo.
Of course here is the dreaded the wake homing torpedo, the one you cannot defend against easily, I haven't checked up on it, but the only defense was an experimental program of the US Navy on an anti torpedo torpedo.
Basically blow up the torpedo before it gets to the ship, they had some test results, but had withdrawn the system past experimenting with it for more testing, but this was a couple of years ago.
The idea of 1 thick plate being better than multiple thinner plates, even if the thinner plates are equal or thicker than the singular plate is interesting. Because we see the opposite wisdom in tank armor. Tank armor will often favor air spaces between layers of relatively thinner armor. This helps mitigate HESH and HEAT rounds and CAN have some effect against sabot penetrators. I'm not speaking of slat/cage armor.
I can only guess that some of the fundamental assumptions in naval armor are different from those of tank armor. That or the difference in degree is so great that it may as well be a difference in kind.
Laminated plate (layered) is weaker for the same reason a karate guy came chop through ice. Break the top one and it hits the one behind it and so on.
@@navyreviewer So why do tanks and AFVs use laminated armor?
It is hard to describe the differences between those two types of systems because every aspect of them is so different. It seems simple at first, battleships seems like tanks of the sea, they both have thick, durable armor and they both have guns designed to defeat their own armor but when you boil it down, the similarities start to evaporate and the differences become so great that they almost aren't comparable anymore.
Case in point, most modern AT shells could convincingly penetrate the armor belt of New Jersey but those same shells can struggle to penetrate the best tank armors, which are usually thinner than 12 inches.
Tanks and IFVs have layered armor because those layers can break up or divert long rod penetrators and/or hyper velocity metal jets more effectively than a monolithic block of material of the same weight. Battleships have monolithic belts because that slab of metal is more effective against the high mass, relatively low velocity shells that are likely to be fired against it. The physics of why that is are much more complicated than a RUclips comment will effectively communicate 😂
If you are curious about how modern and legacy tank armor and shells work, the channels "Dejmian XYZ Simulations" and "SY Simulations" both have many, many videos showing computer simulations of a wide variety of shells interacting with an equally wide variety of armor compositions. Everything from the 75mm Sherman against a Tiger's front plate to a T-72 shooting at the lower glacis of an Abrams.
@@grimlock1471 spaced armor used in moder vehicles is primarily there to damage or disrupt moder armor penetrating projectiles. Laminated armor is usually there so that materials with very different properties can be combined, like putting ceramic between steel plates.
Battleships were facing a very different threat and they did not have the advanced materials we have today in making very effective composite armor. The large naval shells of the time were made from hardened steel & were relatively short & fat. They also were not moving at very high speed as far as projectiles go, plus they are absolutely enormous. So breaking them apart or getting them to tumble was very difficult and not something thin plates could really do. Laminated composites would probably have been fantastic against WW2 era shells but the technology to produce effective ceramics like we have now simply didn't exist at the time.
A modern long rod penetrator or a shaped charge jet is comparatively long & thin, they are also moving at much higher speeds. This makes them much more vulnerable to being broken up or deflected. These modern projectiles also penetrate so much that they must be disrupted to be effectively dealt with by something as small as a vehicle.
Is this the new pre stream intro? As you should keep it
HMS Nelson & Rodney circa 192/30's used i for torpedo protection,
Stephennternal water
The protection against modern torpedoes is actually having multiple layers of hull, this is observed when ships are called "double hulled" or etc, the reason you don't see it often however is that you're now requiring just shy of double the resources for your hull or more depending on how many layers you add on top of reducing your usable interior space which is a premium in ships due to size constraints being limited by using the Panama Canal for convenience.
Today Panamamax somewhere at 1200 ft long and 160 ft wide. So you could design bigger ships today with 20 to 30 feet torpedo depth. Back in WW2 it design limits were 106 ft for width.
The US battleships had triple-layered hulls on the bottom. That’s not a new thing.
Visited your ship, shout out to the radio guys going ham!
Your videos have gotten so good, keep it up, thx
The best defense against torpedoes is not to get hit by one. Best way to achieve that is speed. This is especially effective where the submarine is diesel electric and the ship is a fast one. The faster the ship goes the more difficult it is for the sub to get into position for a firing solution and thus the Ship's Torpedo Danger Zone (TDZ) becomes close to her intended course. If the ship intends to remain in an area, the best thing to do is a constant circle with varying radius of turn. Almost impossible to get a firing solution.
Shinano certainly didn't have the speed. A couple of dodgy turns even if she did and the outcome would have been the same.
Best solution, high speed, aircraft to keep em submerged and not sail anywhere near one!
Lots of DD's :)
If only surface ships were incapable of firing torpedoes. And if only running constantly at high speed would not reduce range by absurd amounts.
That’s reminds me off admiral Jackie fisher argument for battlecruisers “speed is armour”
Perhaps with Torpedoes of world war 2. All of your solutions wouldn’t work against modern torps, modern torps are as manoeuvrable as a hatchback and the firing solution is almost a full 180* on each side of the ship.
yeah ... speed works great , until your problems are just torpedoes. This is why guided bombs and guided missiles were invented, then hiding battleships becomes your admiral main concern, until they were all disposed of, or turned into museums. The battleships, I mean 😃
Thank you, I enjoy your videos.
The old USS America and the Nimitz class supposedly have, in addition to the usual transverse water tight bulkheads, there are two full length longitudinal water tight bulkheads that run from the main deck, which is the hanger deck on American aircraft carriers, all the way down to the bottom of the hull. Aside from giving the ships exceptional compartmentation these would seem to stiffen the ship significantly against torpedoes exploding under the ship and perhaps prevent her back from being broken.
Actually, almost any of the big Nations in World war 2 already had Torpedos with magnetic Detonators in somewhat wide use going into WW2. These Torpedos would detonate from the Magnetic Influence of a Ships Bow. so if you set them to the right depth (and current earth magnetic influence) they would detonate 1m / 3 Feet below the keel of your Target.
they didnt work that well. every nation got rid of them except the us, which was the major problem with the mk14 not exploding. the second was the backup contact fuse, the rod was to narrow and prone to break. once they got rid of the magnetic det and installed a thicker rod the mk14 started to work very well
@@sinsley1 Well the Mk14 is a story of its own. But to my knowledge German G7 type Torpedoes had initial problems with the Magnetic Detonator like it was case with the mk14, but the Germans figured it out after the initial phase of the war and made the detonators work. As far as i know G7 types where used up until the 1960s.
And for example seamines to this day still have magnetic influence sensors.
@@von_dusenhain2523 haven’t heard of the g7 so I can’t comment on that
@@von_dusenhain2523 Not sure on the timeline for fixes with the G7, but reliability issues with magnetically triggered torpedoes were widespread during the war. My general impression back when I read up on this is that it was a technology that was almost, but not quite, ready for primetime. (Which would help explain why they did work in sea mines: it's just a little easier to get a fuse to work on a stationary mine detecting a relatively slow-moving ship, versus on a torpedo where you have engine vibrations and the relative speed of torpedo+target is much higher.)
Interesting, thank you
The best torpedo defense is a good screen of destroyers!
Not sure of the real world practicality of it, but some kind of layer of crushable material, foam or something, under the keel, that would absorb the initial blast. That combined with clever design meant to absorb some flex, and support 'unsupported' sections.
Not sure if/how it would work, but my brain also conjure the image of just blasting a ton of air under the section of the ship before the torpedo detonates. If it were blasted down in very high pressure jets, it might somehow disrupt the blast wave, or maybe do nothing, who knows.
Or, realistically, some form of mini anti-torpedo torpedo to detonate it too soon.
Nice big layer of squishy foam on the outside so torps just bounce off harmlessly! 😁
You should schedule that tank crawl when Drac from the UK comes back!
I'd say the Zeppelin had the best torpedo defense system, staying well out of the water. But it was vulnerable to other attacks. 😁
The best for armoured vehicles was plates with hex standoffs between them. It also adds structural strength without much weight. This would help with detonation from below also.
He explains things in a way that is completely non-understandable to me. This is a first for me.
The whole "entering tanks" thing made me wonder; are there ever any hazardous atmospheres on the ship? Do you have to do any sort of air sampling before entering confined spaces?
Yes, they do vent and perform air quality tests before entering any tank.
That is a very good subject to cover. Confined Spaces. What should be done and what is tested for. And other safety precautions that need to be taken.
He should be on a harness with two way comms to someone who could hoist him out, there should be positive ventilation and a meter to check the composition of the atmosphere. I did not see any of that in the video.
Only two modern battleships come to mind with a single torpedo hit that allowed the results and damage to be investigated that I can think of. IJN Yamato and USS North Carolina. With Yamato, they realized that their torpedo bulkhead backing was too rigid and the braces punched through the torpedo bulkhead and caused way more flooding than they expected. The North Carolina's system worked well even though it was hit in one of its shallowest sections. The place where it was hit was even noted by designers as a problem spot. So I'm thinking the American system was one of the best even thought, due to the width of the Panama canal, they couldn't make it deep enough due to ship beam restrictions.
I like this guy👍
Many of the newest torpedoes are using shaped charges to create a super heated explosion that burns through the hull, really only the US Mark 48 is still a keel breaker, that way they can use the new light weight torpedoes.
the only real defense against modern torpedo is just sheer size. Be so big that the torp just does localized damage that you can accept and keep going. Maybe the WW2 pyecrete aircraft carrier that never got built would be able to deal with torpedos, not only accepting the damage, but being able to do actual self repair at sea. What if the US or UK built a battleship hull out of Pyecrete?
Friedman came to the conclusion that the rebuilt American Standards had the best actual WWII torpedo defense systems, especially after analysis of the faulty lower belt attachment design of the Yamatos AND the SoDaks and Iowas.
5:21 A significant emotional event as it were
Did you ever imagine you'd end up being daily entertainment and education for thousands and thousands of people? Like i click your videos as soon as I see them. Minus this one, obviously. Little late.
It was not something that was ever planned, its great, but a little weird for us.
A honeycomb ribbed Keel designs can overcome modern torpedoes.
As to the bismarck, it's hard to put avoid space around a rudder. Fortunately you are with flying those swordfishes seemed to know that.
Would multi-hull designs help with modern torpedoes? Or putting a hull or multiple hulls within a hull? Or maybe put your ships on hydrofoils? Or maybe we need anti-torpedo torpedoes, perhaps using small, rocket-propelled, super-cavitating point-defense torps.
Cat or tri-marans? Not really, they are still not built to take those kinds of stresses.
@@gregorywright4918 But they could be built that way, and the shape might deflect an underwater blast effectively like the underside of an MRAP.
We were told on our FFG our main mission was ASW # 2 was escorting battle groups
We were to intercept torpedoes with our hull
Ryan finally with some love for the Bismarck! Eventually you’ll come over to the dark side and be a Bismarck lover.
They should invite him to come onto Bismarck and give tours.
Not likely. Ask anyone that has seriously studied battleship design and they'll universally tell you Bismarck was a dog. It was the best WW1 battleship built during WW2.
Hmm you know something about Swedish navy stuff? would love to hear about those bc of the U-boat history
Best one is the one that keeps the water out of the people tank.
Kitty Hawk Class carriers. Because they were not constrained by the Panama Canal size they were designed with the multilayered void system. At the time of their launch, it was expected to be effective against the torpedoes in existence at the time.
The Nimitz class improved on that with full length longitudinal bulkheads that ran from the bottom of the hull to the main deck (which is the hanger deck on an American aircraft carrier).
How about working with Drachinfinel on how an Iowa would've dealt with a hit similar to a Fritz X?
Great point about the surplus of useless ships available during the interwar period.
Too bad the U.S. Naval Bureau of Ordnance didn’t grab a couple and actually test their Mk. 14 torpedo, and the Mk. 13 aerial torpedo, and the Mk. 15 destroyer torpedo, before issuing all that nonfunctioning garbage to the fleet.
Well you have the steel crushing tubes that Royal Navy ships of WW1 used, the water as armour that the Nelrods had
There is the terrible purgalese system that i believe if the Royal Navy had taken Vittorio Veneto on would have ripped out so the weight saved to improve her deck armour
The Pugliesse System wasn't terrible, it just was designed in an era where there wasn't the time to test such concepts out at scale. The only thing wrong with the Pugliesse System is that they put the liquid where the void should be, and the void where the liquid should be. Many people forget that liquid is incompressible and would deform and transfer energy just as a solid sheet of steel would. If the Pugliesse System had a liquid surrounded by a void, it would offer the space for the outer hull to deform, a liquid to catch the spall, and followed by another void to give space for the liquid filled portion to deform prior to hitting the citadel. The Italians planned on fixing this solution on later Littorio class BBs as well as any future designs that Ansaldo and OTO were cooking up.
When you think about it, the Italians would have ended up with a design almost the same as Iowa's, with their Pugliesse System replacement
Nowadays anti-spalling is done with Kevlar, but of course that wasn't around in WW2. It's intriguing to solve the problem with perhaps liquid fuel!
I'm curious whether it was ever studied to have an outer plate that actually folds away from the ship while underway, leaving a gap filled with seawater between the plate and the actual hull of the ship. This would certainly create some extra drag, but my intuition (without actually crunching any numbers) is that it wouldn't be that bad. Perhaps that intuition is incorrect, though. Having a folding plate could allow it to be folded up against the hull when in dry dock, navigating a canal, etc., then folded back out away from the hull when back in open water. (Of course, this wouldn't help against modern torpedoes.)
Whatever mechanism you designed to fold and unfold the system would have to be VERY strong to deal with the pressure of 20-30 knots underway speed. The non-folding versions of what you are talking about were called bulges, and they did create significant drag.
@@gregorywright4918 Yes, it would need to be strong, but I wouldn't think that it would get a lot of pressure from the speed through the water, as the plate would be parallel to the flow of water (i.e. parallel to the hull,) so the cross-section of it should just be the leading edge. The primary advantages of this over torpedo blisters/bulges would be that it could be retracted when needed and that it would not significantly increase the cross-section of the ship relative to the flow of water. Granted, it would likely experience very high hydrodynamic loading during turns.
It's entirely possible that I'm just underestimating skin drag, though. Obviously, any cross-sectional area exposed to the water flow experiences enormous drag, but I'm not familiar enough with hydrodynamics to know how much drag is experienced on surfaces that are parallel to the flow (i.e. skin drag.) I know this can generate quite significant drag on aircraft (which is a large part of why it's important for the wings and fuselage to remain clean,) but I'm not sure how that translates to hydrodynamics at 30 kt vs. aerodynamics at hundreds of kt.
Why is such a large (arguably important) overhead conduit located in a space which was essentially designed to be expendable? I mean not that they PLAN on getting hit there, but is all that wiring just for stuff outside of the main belt and they have to collect it and run through one area? That might be an interesting video actually, are there any locations where something was built through the full thickness of the main armor belt?
I learned something.... New Jersey does 139 gallons to the mile or 0.007 MPG (land miles for all)
So in other words, letting one of the screening destroyers or cruisers take the torpedo hit is best?
Even as a diehard USN fanboy I have to say the Yamatos TDS pretty much proved itself the most effective given how many each ship absorbed and continued to function. Their shear size allowed tremendous depth of protection and that is the best defense protection. That said, I believe the system used by HMS Repulse was even more effective, avoid being hit altogether as long as possible!
The Yamato is the only WW2 ship that was not constrained by the Washington/London Naval Treaties. Yes, size is better, but it was still defeated by massed attack.
How many torpedoes the Yamatos ate is different from how many it would have taken to sink them. The US wasn’t conducting an experiment, so it wasn’t going to wait around to see the fewest number of torps it took to sink them. It just hit them as many times as it could. It’s very likely that they would have sunk with significantly fewer hits (which, it must be mentioned, were small air-dropped torps). Look at the damage Yamato took from one lucky hit with a Mark 14 in 1943 and you’ll see that their TDS wasn’t all that great. B
As below, best defense is not to get hit by a torpedo. Therefore today the key is detection of the torpedo and the means to eliminate as far from your ship as possible. Explosions in water lose their effectiveness over distance, so the farther away the torpedo explodes the better. Passive ways is Nixie (trail a steel cable that is able to mask the ship, or create more noise, or electronic countermeasures). Active could be a smaller torpedo used to hunt the incoming torpedo. Another would be similar to the old hedgehog (sub countermeasure for U-boats from WW2), except in this case would drop down over an area the torpedo would come into (again the farther from the ship as possible).
A third measure is the construction of the ship itself.
Most of the weight of the ship lies or is attached to the keel, break the keel, break/sink the ship. In drydock the ship lies on the keel to support the weight of the ship.
So what could you use to strengthen the ship construction to support the weight of the ship when water doesn't support its weight. Torsional decks that resist bending (torsion boxes). These decks would have to be long at least 2-3 X explosion diameter (also supported by torsional bulkheads longitudinally min 4 to provide a very stiff box). A suspension bridge has stay cables under tension, to hold the weight of the bridge decks on suspension bridges. The problem with this is the anchor has to be supported by water (the support is not undermined by the explosion). On a battleship the fwd and aft armor bulkheads could be used as anchors (towers on suspension bridges).
Also below someone mention venting the explosion to the surface. Probably not practical due to the explosive amount of gases, but I like the idea of "path of least resistance" of the explosion to follow. This could possibly screw up the secondary effect of a torpedo explosion.
Problem there is that you are assuming the bubble is centered under your ship - if it is not, your "torsional deck" has no end support. Plus the ship is moving.
Would the defensive properties of the liquid filled spaces vary significantly depending on the properties of that liquid? i.e. salinity, viscosity, density, etc.. As in, would fuel be better than seawater (or was fuel worse, but you needed it along anyway)?
You don't need #6 bunker when the fuel is U(235).
The Iowa has 13" hardened steel belt armor with 4" more in a double shell hull. If it made it through that. 17" hardened steel pilot house with a periscope. Clear, red, and yellow, lenses.
I love the massive torpedo defences of the WWI monitors. They couldn't move fast, as they were mainly anchored up doing shore bombardment, so were really vulnerable to submarines. They also didn't have to move fast, as they didn't have to chase enemy ships, so you get these absolutely ridiculous torpedo bulges.
The down side to wide ships isnt just speed. It's also fuel consumption (ie range.)
@navyreviewer True, but when the farthest you're going is the Flanders coast, that doesn't matter either.
UK in WW1 had torpedo bulges that slowed ships but seemed to work well enough. So Lord Clive class monitor would be an option if very slow.
There were also stories of Japanese convoy decoy ships that had minimum draft and were at least partly filled with ping pong balls or other light and Bryant filler. No idea if these really existed.
Honestly, I’d say tactics of keeping up speed is the best defense. See what happened to Yorktown. Submarines could only go about 22 kts of the surface and 8 submerged. This holds true today. Subs can go faster, but they’ll start cavitating and they can be detected. The Japanese system was not good. Shinano (Yamato hull) and Shokaku show how it didn’t work for the Japanese. No modern German or Italian capital ship was sunk by torpedoes alone so we just don’t know. Bismarck had some 400-600 shells hit her before Dorsetshire finished her off. The Brits lost Ark Royal to a single torpedo, and Prince of Wales got sunk by a golden bb/torpedo. North Carolina held up well. Saratoga seemed to have a collection of Japanese torpedoes but never sank. Her sister Lexington wasn’t sunk by torpedoes, but by poor damage control. So I’m gonna go with the US system just based on experience.
What sank the Yamato were torpedoes, all on one side. Bombs typically bounced off the armor.
👍👍
The British had a good wide blister on a few of their refits and monitors.
When the navy basically rebuilt the California ended up over 120 foot beam..for two reasons..torpedo defense and extra ballast... She went from 97ft to her fat self and did well as probably the best in torpedo defense
Hedgehog depth charges
Interesting that I can't find 3-95-8 on the booklet of general plans. The space appears to be SD Storeroom 3-91-2-A
Could a catastrophic fuel fire really sink an Iowa?
The fuel they run on is so thick that it will put out a match you stick into it so no, not really.
If a shell doesn't get to any magazines there is little chance of a fire. The paint locker right at the front of the ship could burn and the fuel for the spotting planes and helicopters was stored right at the back in a way that it could be easily dumped over board as this would burn as well, but the fuel the ship ran on was not a worry. Heck, the coal ships ran on 40 year before the Iowas was used as Armor!!!!
@@willpat3040 In college, I worked for a couple of summers as a roofer and we would clean up with gasoline. I saw people drop burning cigarettes into open pans and the liquid gasoline just snuffed out the cigarette. It is the fuel vapors that are flammable. This all reinforces your point that the fuel oil has to be heated up and aerated before it can burn. And the coal fired ships were more concerned with the coal dust (similar to grain silo explosions which require both floating dust and an ignition source).
@@willpat3040on her last commission USS NJ was using diesel for the boilers.
Not an expert here.
Couldn't a system of Point defense cannons (basically Flak cannons with explosive shells pointed at the water) that are distributed all over the ship, work as a viable torpedo protection system?
Today with current radar and sonar, maybe 🤔 before it was just a lucky "BB" (Golden) hit to protect the ⚓ ship.
The Olde saying since Bikini 👙...one shell one ship sunk (Nuclear).
If see it and have time to react
Anti torpedo torpedos..as it were..
Seems to me there are stories of sailors using a 50 cal sized machine gun to shoot torpedos and they'd blow. Sometimes an M1 rifle and later an M14 rifle would work on a mine. The problem with a larger gun is getting it on target in time with enough ammo flying at it to hit it. I think they're traveling around 30 kts. They're about 24" across. I always wondered if that was a sea story or not. Did they really do that?
@@robertthomas5906 These would have to be very near the surface to see. Also in WW2 the trail of compressed gas gave way the torpedo 's path. Modern torpedoes run on fuel and don't have a trail. Also have to take into account for line of sight and the diffraction of light between the air and water (diffraction of light between mediums), something in the water is not where you actually see it. Also the density of water slows the bullets down.
Wouldn't the triple bottom help mitigate the damage of a modern torpedo?