"Ships with design flaws in their protection schemes." Topic

Forgive my ignorance but I do not know much about this subject.

It seems that I have read comments about ships like HMS Hood in WWII and the British battlecruisers at Jutland having design flaws which lead to them taking catastrophic damage. Is this true? Has anyone compiled lists of this type of information which could be applied to rules from the pre-dreadnought age through WWII?

TIA

Allen

There is a theory that the British battlecruisers that blew up at Jutland did so because they did not follow safety protocols in ammunition handling more than design flaws.

Apparently the battlecruisers did not get as much firing practice as the BBs, so to make up for their lower proficiency they opted for higher rates of fire. Which was accomplished by ditching a lot of the safety protocols for ammo handling, which made them more apt to blow up than they should have been.

The British BCs were under armored for the role they were asked to play but all the evidence points to bad ammo handling except maybe for "Invincible." The "Is" had been training at Scapa but may have continued the casual handling practices of the BC Fleet.

I recall that among the protocols ignored was closing flash protection doors between turrets and magazines in the turret stems. A shell blowing up in the turret when the doors were open… was not good.

Poor ammo storage was definitely a problem at Jutland. I've also seen a documentary which I think was about the Hood, where divers found silk powder bags still stacked in the "silo" leading up from the keel to the turrets.

But the BCs were definitely not designed for a brawl, and I think (in addition to the lack of armor) a lot of the blame should go to Admiral Beatty and his decision to employ his BCs as if they were battleships or dreadnoughts. The German fleet was better built for survivability, and it showed when the Indefatigable and Queen Mary both exploded from hits that might not have penetrated a heavier ship's armor.

That, and the British signals development had not kept pace with the rate of change in engine power and long-range gunnery, both of which made the distances over which the engagement was fought much greater than was feasible for flags and signal lights.

Shagnasty has it.

The Battle cruisers were designed to run down enemy cruisers and destroy them with ease. They weren't designed to take on Battleships, which is what they were asked to do at Jutland. At the Falklands the Invincible and Inflexible did this handily to Von Spee's cruiserswith almost no damage to themselves.

It certainly doesn't help when the BCs were not designed to take plunging fire on their decks. You get plunging fire at long ranges, as opposed to close-range fire that hits on their sides.

The Iowas have very heavy deck armor, while the Hood and sisters have cruiser-weight deck armor at best.

What about other countries ships?

I read that the German Learn about plunging fire from The battle of Dogger bank.

You see the same thing with lightly armored but heavily armed tank destroyers. They are not designed to slug it out with their more heavily armored cousins. But, if they look like a tank…

The latter German capital ships (Derfflinger, Baden classes and later), had large torpedo decks which were subject to severe flooding. Lutzow was apparently lost due to this, Baden almost sank on a small Russian mine.

Yamato class battleships had unspectacular underwater protection. A single submarine torpedo put each out of action for a considerable length of time. 3000 tons of water shipped in each case.

What about other countries ships?

I'm less familiar with their designs, so abstain from commenting. I would suspect that many of the other WW1 designs serving in WW2 may have suffered from the same deficiency, though, as gunnery just wasn't expected at those ranges when they were designed.

Turns out there was a particularly nasty design defect in the Yamato-class's torpedo protection. There was actually a 10foot gap in the protection, the torpedo bulge stopped 10 feet below the normal waterline. There was also a strong beam connecting the top of the torpedo bulge to the inner hull right at that point.

With all the trouble that US submariners had with their Mk14 torps, the captains tended to set them very shallow. When the Shinano was attacked, the torpedoes were set to 10 feet (and actually seem to have hit on-depth). This transmitted the force of the 1000lb warhead into the inner structure of the hull. Now, IIRC the Shinano was hit by 6 Mk14s (of 10 fired), so you'd better believe she would have gone down regardless of the other deficiencies in her specific case. Like the lack of watertight seals on her "watertight" doors.

Or the dud torpedo fired by USS Albacore that still punched a hole in the CV Taiho,enough to flood compartments,start electrical fires,shorting out the electricity, and still send her to the bottom about 12 or so hours later.

The Italians developed a system designed to lessen the damage inflicted by torpedo hits.

Named after the designer, the Pugliese anti-torpedo system promised much on paper, but actually turned out to be a complete disaster in practice. Owing to the rivets which held the thing in place shearing with the force of a torpedo explosion (and sometimes even when near misses detonated close to the ship), and the system not being able to be built to its proper dimensions at both ends of the ship, it actually proved to take much less damage by torpedoes to disable Italian warships, than comparable vessels from other nations.

Old Slow Trot the Taiho would've survived had the crew did it's job properly.

Armor protection schemes are a funny thing; it's not just how much but how it's laid out. Later US battleships were known for 'all or nothing' armor for example, which in theory made the most vital sections of the ship extremely tough but left everything else basically unprotected. The Bismarck was well armored, but the armor scheme was based heavily on the techniques used during the First World War. Every nation had it's own policies when it came to how to setup the armor protection for a ship, and it often varied class by class. I'm not sure a comprehensive list is possible….

-Will

The Prince of Wales was crippled by a single torpedo hit to one of the propeller shafts. The spinning shaft then tore open a big gash in the hull which flooded part of the engine room. Unfortunately the main electrical panel was right there. When it shorted out, all the electrically driven parts (which included steering and all the gun turrets) were immobilized. That left PoW a sitting duck for the follow-up attacks.

Other navies in WWI aren't really comparable. Japanese Kongo Class was basically HMS Tiger- again with armored protection way too light. Ialian ships were lightly built on the battle cruiser model or rather on a lighter battleship model. Russians ships followed Italian design (Lord knows why) and the less said the better French ships in WWI were fairly well armored and only caught the Battleship fever after the war, though they tried- the made a lot of designs. Americans caught the Battlecruiser fever late and luckily turned them into carriers.

The problem with other navies was not design but poverty. They really didn't have the money to buy big buff battleships and the yards to build or maintain them. Perhaps the best example of this is my favorite ship, HMS
Agincourt, which had fairly light armor spread over a long hull to accommodate 14 12" guns in 12 turrets. It LOOKED great, nice ship to fire from not a good ship to get hit in and worst- torpedoed in. She started as the Brazilian Rio De Jenairo and when they ran out of money they let her molder and rust for a while in the dock. Then the Turks bought her as the Sultan Osmin I, but she never saw Turkish service. You all know this, but she was not a really sound ship. Luckily, she was not damaged at Jutland.

Most of the battleships in other navies were odd-lots. Perhaps the mallest and weakest being the Spanish Jaimie Primero, which looked like an Invincible Battle Cruiser on the displacement of a King Edward VII (about half the length)and which had even weaker armor than Inflexible I believe.

It takes a lot of money to build a battleship and a lot more to maintain it. If you don't it's a dangerous wreck- to your side. Someone might actually get the fool idea to sortie it!

.

Even the mighty Yamato had it's problems…

A bloody great big longitudinal bulkhead ran right down the centre line of the ship, from bow to stern. There were no hatches or openings in this thing, just a solid mass of steel. When she was under attack by the US planes that would finally sink her, as torpedoes hit her on one side, the water couldn't be distributed across the width of the ship, making her tilt much more quickly than would have been the case without this steel wall.

Indeed during that attack, there was one instance when the captain thought the ship was going to capsize, only for the other side of the vessel to take a few torpedoes which flooded and brought her back to a more even keel.

Centreline bulkheads were a feature of several Japanese crextensive selectionses. Hitting then amidships with a torpedo frequently caused rapid capsize.

German capital ships in WW1 were heavily subdivided, but extensive networks of bilge and ballast system piping made from brittle materials that cracked under shock loading degraded its performance.

German cruisers and larger vessels had notoriously weak sterns that occasionally dropped off when the ship was hit aft.

There are many, many more examples

British ships were generally less heavily armoured than their German counterparts for the simple reason that the former had to police a global empire, which required them to steam long distances and be at sea for months. As such, the weight of the ship and the size and quality of the crew accommodation were particularly important. The German fleet was designed to sail out into the North Sea and fight the Royal Navy's Home Fleet – end of. Armour could be much heavier because time at sea was to be measured in days, whilst crew accommodation was Spartan as they mostly lived in blockhouses ashore.

Add into that equation the space needed for fuel, SM. Particularly a factor with coal fired ships but also important with oil. The RN had to provide larger bunker space for their ships that the Germans did.

There is also the fact that technology moves on. Hood is usually given as the example of a ship without enough armour but in fact her scheme was very similar to that of the Queen Elizabeth class battleships. However during World War One firing and hitting started at ranges that really no one predicted which meant the deck armour was struck more often and at angles far closer to square on. Hood was basically a WW1 ship when she met her end. Bismarck perversely was another one with a bad scheme, it was good at keeping her a float but too many vital things were outside the main citadel.

Equally some ships were simply lucky. SMS Seydlitz suffered a major ammunition fire at Dodgers Bank which burned out two turrets. Her survival was for a large part due to which action by the crew – the same being true of HMS Lion at Jutland. While other ships like POW were put down by bad damage control decisions.

Hard things to account for in a rule system without it becoming eye bleedingly complicated.

Hard things to account for in a rule system without it becoming eye bleedingly complicated.

Computer moderation can help there. Gamers just move the ships and choose firing patterns. I don't even remember rolling dice in the one game, but that was 15 years ago, now.

Well, giving Japanese CVs really bad survivability it pretty accurate. When one bomb burns out your ship, there probably was a "design flaw." Particularly when there were lots of places that the bomb could have hit with the same effect.

You can't really generalise about Japanese carrier designs as there were so different, representing about 20 years worth of experimentation – same as US and GB really. They range from the Shokaku and Zuikaku, probably the best carriers in the world until the Essex class to small experimental designs that were flawed as functioning fleet carriers.

A factor that they mainly shared that made bomb hits more devastating was that the hanger deck was enclosed, unlike US WW2 carriers where it was open to the elements, so any explosion on the hanger deck was contained and magnified. Not sure this is a 'flaw' exactly though as the US eventually decided to enclose its hanger decks as well.

The Japanese problem was not so much ship design but atrocious ammunition and fuel handing procedures s well as sometimes poor damage control procedures. Hanger decks with open fuel lines and bombs all over the place spelled disaster when they were hit. And damage control that in some instances was incompetent led to the loss of ships that should not have been lost. Mind you, on other occasions they fought long and hard to try and save damaged carriers.

So bit of a microcosm for the Japanese Navy overall really – some of the best ships in the world but underneath serious flaws that meant it was nowhere near as good as it thought it was.

The comments about the effect of enclosed hangars applies to British carriers, as well. The benefits of an armored flight deck and enclosed hangars meant the whole structure had to be integral to the hull. On those occasions when a bomb did penetrate the flight deck, the explosion would be contained, but at a price. It was found post war (during deep surveys of such carriers) that substantial, previously hidden, structual damage had occurred. Sometimes a design benefit (the armored flight deck) can result in unintended design flaws (the hidden damage).

Sorry, just to clarify, when I meant the explosion was 'contained', I meant this as a bad thing, the whole of the energy from the bomb blast would be absorbed by the ship.

Japanese carriers differed from British that like the American carriers the deck was part of the superstructure not the hull. The hanger was therefore not within the hull either but it was enclosed by additional superstructure building on top of the deck.

No one was sure how to build a carrier pre-war so the three navies had slightly differing ideas. Even the Essex class were still not quite there – lacking a hurricane bow for instance.

I do have sympathy for the designers involved in the 20s and 30s though. Lots of practice in other classes of ship, people had sort of figured out what a destroyer or battleship should include / look like. Aircraft carriers, they started wit a literal blank sheet.

In several games, the USN has a huge advantage in damage control skills, which let them keep ships in the fight longer and could prevent the sinking.

Unfortunately, we'd lost a lot of that by the time of the USS Forestall fire. Guess how hard the USN trains for firefighting and other damage control now?

No lie, Lion. What's the standard line, 'You're whatever your rating is and a firefighter, too'.

The German battle cruisers tightened up there procedure after Dogger Bank in 1915 where they lost the Blucher and almost lost the Seydlitz.

The British inquiry after Jutland, tightened up there ammunition handling procedure, Faulty ammunition and long range gunnery,

The problem with Battle Cruisers is they look like and are gunned like battleships,
So they are put in to the situations and treated like battleships.
At best they are a big gunned cruiser.

The later ones where known as "Jackie Fisher's Follies"

The best thing you can do with them is make them in to aircraft carriers.

The British gunpowder in WWI also was somewhat unstable and had a tendency to flash.

From the following: link

"Both Mark I and MD were in use during World War I, and both had poor storage characteristics with their stability degrading over time. A study performed after World War I found that MD tended to form highly unstable micro-sized dust particles consisting of nitrocellulose and iron pyrites. These unfortunate traits led to several ships suffering magazine explosions during World War I, both in action and in harbor."

All nations had powder stability and ammunition handling problems, leading to the loss of several warships during WWI:
gwpda.org/naval/thist24.htm
The French also lost two pre-dreadnoughts to accidental powder explosions before WWI (Liberté 1911, Iena 1907).

David K. Brown's works on warship development in the Royal Navy are technical (for a layman) but extremely interesting if you want to learn about the development of battleship armor schemes:
- Warrior to Dreadnought: Warship Development 1860-1905
- Grand Fleet: Warship Design and Development 1906-1922
- Nelson to Vanguard: Warship Design 1923-1945

What's the standard line, 'You're whatever your rating is and a firefighter, too'.

The Chief running my initial firefighting training at RTC Great Lakes said, "The Marines say that 'every Marine is a rifleman.' Well, here, every Sailor is a firefighter."

German armour layouts in WW2 were essentially the same as in late WW1 – ie Bismark & Tirpitz are simply Koenig on steroids. Germans placed much of their firefighting and electrical distribution above the main armour deck and below the splinter deck, so anything that came through the splinter deck would not penetrate the main deck armour (so they stayed afloat) but they lost fire fighting and power in short order. Bismark and Scharnhorst both were blazing hulks incapable of returning effective fire well before they sank. Tirpitz less so – but nothing afloat would have survived that attack anyway.

Germans placed much of their firefighting and electrical distribution above the main armour deck and below the splinter deck, so anything that came through the splinter deck would not penetrate the main deck armour (so they stayed afloat) but they lost fire fighting and power in short order.

Jeez, if I was Donitz I'd be hanging some ship designers for that!

Critical ships systems need to be INSIDE the armor!!!

Battlecurisers were meant to fight heavy and light cruisers and other Battlecurisers. Not intended to fight Battleships.

It gets worse with the German WWII designs. In the Scharnhorst class it was found that the engineering plant was too tall to fit under the main armor deck (Germans placed their main armor deck lower than anyone else). So they let the engineering plant poke through the armor and then placed an armored 'box' or 'tophat' around it (which was not heavily armored). Guess where one of Duke of York's 14" shells hit? Yep, right in that weak 'tophat'. Results were a wrecked powerplant.

In the German's defense, their designs were based on what they knew best, ie, the WWI Baden/Konig/Kaiser classes. They didn't really have access to any of the newer design ideas. Still, they did make some real bad design choices.

"In the German's defense, their designs were based on what they knew best, ie, the WWI Baden/Konig/Kaiser classes. They didn't really have access to any of the newer design ideas."

I'm not really sure how different that is from the situation any other navy was in. Neither Japan, France, Italy, nor the United States built any battleships between the end of WWI and the late thirties/early forties. Everyone save England took something of a hiatus on the Battleship, so Germany wasn't particularly unique in that respect. (And the English exception was a whole whopping two ships already in design as a response to Japan and the U.S. upgunning late in WWI.)

Further, I can't really believe Germany's access to other nations ship designs was really any worse than anyone else's. Germany could presumably have consulted her allies or countries with whom she had friendly relations. (Japan, Italy, and at that time the Soviet Union.) Shipbuilding industries building for foreign navies (which everyone did) had to let at least some information out, and once out it's hard to completely control who gets it. Technical information was a little less controlled before WWII in general, as I understand it. Germany wasn't going to get the same level of detail about USN or RN designs, but they wouldn't have been completely ignorant of them. Arguably this gave them a more complete picture of world naval thought, since they weren't completely in the dark about Japanese designs to the extent of the Allies.

And the preference for delicate high-performance/high-maintenance equipment is quite evident in any number of German designs outside the naval. I can only assume there's some cultural drive to experiment. Scharnhort's HP power-plant is clearly not a WWI design, therefore the flaws aren't flaws of WWI thinking. The idea of building a front-line warship with a diesel plant was also rather new. Germany's destroyers, likewise, owe little to WWI. Really, it seems to me that Germany had roughly the same opportunities to improve their naval architecture as everyone else, with the slight (and rather artificial) exception of treaty cruisers.

I was only speaking about the armor scheme. Whatever the reason, the armor scheme on the Scharnhorst/Bismarck classes was definitely not up to same used by the USN and RN (both of which had adopted the all-or-nothing scheme first used on the Oklahoma; a pre-WWI design). And the engineering plant popping through the armor deck was just plain stupid.

The all or nothing – raft armor scheme was the best compromise for a potential long range or short range battle. Like might be found in the Pacific. If you only expect to fight under 15,000 meters like in the North Atlantic the cathedral armor scheme like the Bismarck is best. Especially with the angled main deck behind the main belt which was 20% better than the Iowa.

Designing an Achilles heel of 80mm vertical armor protecting the engine on the Scharnhorst – basically they had it coming.

If you only expect to fight under 15,000 meters like in the North Atlantic the cathedral armor scheme like the Bismarck is best.

How do you figure that you will never see combat over 15kyards?

Exactly. Even the North Atlantic has a lot clear days. The more I learn about the Kreigsmarine, the less impressed I am by it.

How do you figure that you will never see combat over 15kyards?

You then have a bad day…

Or someone comes up with radar fire control and you can't even see them at 15,000 meters.

Again, you have a bad day…

Mobius is right about Bismarck being designed to fight at shortish ranges… but this wasn't to take place in the North Atlantic.

She was designed to operate as part of the Z Plan fleet, the main goal being to take on the Royal Navy in a fight in the North Sea. Only when control of the sea had been wrenched from our lads in this battle, did the Germans then intend to form their surface fleet into squadrons, send them into the N. Atlantic, and hunt down the convoys. The fact she had separate secondary and main AA armaments suddenly makes a bit more sense now. In the North Sea, it would have been quite possible for the German ships to come under attack from heavy units, light forces and aircraft simultaneously. It was just too bad for the Kriegsmarine that Hitler couldn't help himself, he just had to kick off the war five or six years before he'd promised Raeder the fleet would be needed.

Mind you, I suspect it was wishful thinking on the Germans part, to think the British would have allowed this massive naval build up without responding with a major fleet expansion of their own!

Picking a fight with the RN in their pond, within range of land-based air?

What were the Krauts smoking, and where can I get some?!?

Well I suppose the Germans thought they were going to have to fight the RN at some stage. By doing this in the North Sea, and of course providing Goering would be cooperative, the KM would have had air support of their own. In any case, remember at this stage, the admirals and grand admirals still underestimated the potential of the aircraft, maybe they considered them a harmless annoyance at best?

Then may also have thought any damaged ships would stand a good chance of returning to a home port, something which would have been most unlikely if they engaged the RN in the North Atlantic.

I suspect the strategy would have ended in much the same way as the German High Sea Fleet in WW1, tied down in their bases, trying to figure out a way of enticing a proportion of the RN to come out, while avoiding a fight with the full might of the Home Fleet.

And then they would also have had the attentions of British aircraft attacking them at their moorings to contend with..?