Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

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lostnomad
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by lostnomad »

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

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

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GeoModder
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by GeoModder »

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

wiki rip --> Design of the Iowa-class began in 1938 and they were ordered in 1939; with the treaty no longer effective carried 16-inch guns on a displacement of 45,000 tons. <-- wiki rip.
They shouldn't have been heavier then 35,000 tons if they had stayed within the bounds of the treaty.
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pinheadh78
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by pinheadh78 »

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

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

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by discord »

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

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

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by Nemo »

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


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



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

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

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

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


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

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by GeoModder »

discord wrote:geo: i think it is you who need to read the whole article ---> For this reason, in 1938 the treaty parties agreed on a new displacement limit of 45,000 tons for battleships. <---- due to some significant naval powers NOT signing the treaty, and building larger ships.
Thus the original pretext was no longer valid and the original treaty became void.
EOC.
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by discord »

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

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

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

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

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

geo: This London Naval Treaty effectively ended on 1 September 1939 and the first Iowa class was ordered on 1 July 1939, it was a bloody treaty ship, so says those that know. there was some small change to underwater armoring which gained it some weight before the keel was laid, but it was designed as a treaty ship.
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by Nemo »

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


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

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

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


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

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RedDwarfIV
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by RedDwarfIV »

IIRC, FAEs are up to 4Kt.

That's a conventional explosive that could easily punch a ship in half. It'd have to be a big missile though, which would make it easy to shoot down.
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by discord »

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

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

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

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

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

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by GeoModder »

discord wrote:geo: This London Naval Treaty effectively ended on 1 September 1939 and the first Iowa class was ordered on 1 July 1939, it was a bloody treaty ship, so says those that know. there was some small change to underwater armoring which gained it some weight before the keel was laid, but it was designed as a treaty ship.
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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by Nemo »

discord wrote:fifteen times greater... assuming the higher 30Gy value, always count pessimistically, 15 times higher gets us approx. 7 Gy inside a montana turret
And times 5 for the Shipwreck's low end estimated yield for 45 Gy. So well take the Montana turret armor of 22.5 inches and add 3 more inches, but I don't like halves so I'll round it down to 25 inches. The Zumwalt is 600 feet in length and has a beam of 81 feet. Well visualize a cylinder 520 feet long 80 feet in diameter, and a sphere 80 feet in diameter, then another cylinder and sphere that are that big minus 25 inches. Take the volume of the difference and work out that cubic mass. Lets see, just 36,076 long tons of steel to add to the Zumwalt's 14,564 long tons. 50,640 Long tons of ship.

A bit sloppy on the math I know,and check it as always. The cylinder ends are duplicating mass with the spheroid caps, but I figure it would take mass to adapt the armor shell to the ship so I figure that little bit can wash. You could make the shell out of lead instead, should come out to around 21,000 long tons. Lets just say 20,000 long tons on top of the Zumwalts 14,564 and call it 35,000 long tons.

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by discord »

nemo: in other words possible, and there are other composites that does that perticular job better at lower thickness and weight.
the question as i pointed out is, is it in any way better than stealth and if so, is it practically applicable?

geo: a treaty is a piece of paper that the parties have agreed to follow, the design of the iowa followed the restrictions of the treaty in question, true both the gun size and BB tonnage had been increased within the treaty before it effectively expired due to war, but that still makes it a treaty ship.

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by Nemo »

No not feasible. I'm just showing the math, its been thought through. Decrease the detonation range from 500 feet to 50 for 100 times the power and increase the yield on the weapon to 500 kilotons for the SS N 19's upper range estimate for a total of 500 times more power. That requires nine more halvings to reduce back to the same power. Up armor it again and I'll throw bigger and bigger weapons at it which also have already existed for decades.

All of which continues to assume air burst, even a fraction of that power under the ship would shred the hull. You can't have the nuclear impervious setup you want, the math doesn't support it.

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by pinheadh78 »

Just a thought; but if I can successfully hit you're nuclear-proof ship with one nuke (even a smaller one) then I can probably hit it with a second and third.

Given that I expect that you to have strong anti-air-war systems I'll be firing those nukes in salvos of probably 20 or more which can be delivered from a multiple attack vectors by submarine, surface, combatant, aircraft, and space transiting systems.

Point is, if the situation has escalated to the point of nuclear weapons, and your opponent really really wants your ship sunk. They will use as many nukes as it takes.

In a non-nuclear environment, yes you could probably build a super ship with crazy thick armor that is impervious to multiple anti-ship missiles. To that I would direct you to the battle of the German Battleship Bismark and Tirpitz for how the ship would hold up and eventually be sunk.

Bismark remained afloat after being hit hit several times by the WWII equivalent of an anti-ship missile; however it was mission killed (couldn't maneuver) after the torpedo hit its rudder then again after its primary guns were knocked out; even though most of the crew was still alive and the ship was floating. Tirpitz career was less remarkable having spent most of its time in port; however it showed that smaller anti-ship bombs and torpedoes couldn't sink it; what eventually sank it was gigantic custom-built bombs call tall-boys.

The best way to avoid those fates is to make it really hard for your enemy to see you (so they can't shoot their weapons in the first place) and then having very strong anti-air-war suite so you can shoot down the inbound conventional/nuclear missiles when they do find you. Eventually you would be mission-killed by either running out of missiles (hope you have guns as backup) or sustaining a direct or near-miss that shreds your own sensors.

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by Nemo »

pinheadh78 wrote:Just a thought; but if I can successfully hit you're nuclear-proof ship with one nuke (even a smaller one) then I can probably hit it with a second and third.

On that thought, don't think I mentioned it yet but the Shipwrecks were fired in salvos. They networked together and autonomously coordinated their attack on a target too. Not bad for 70s tech, assuming it actually worked. It was Russian after all.

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by pinheadh78 »

Yes exactly; anti-ship missiles are usually fired in salvos and from multiple vectors. No one shoots them in just one or two as they expect that a percentage will be shot down.

Read the chapter "Dance of the Vampires" in the novel Red-Storm Rising by the late Tom Clancy for an idea of how a modern soviet-style anti-ship missile mission would probably play-out.

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by discord »

pin: the question as you so nicely danced around it is between armor and stealth.

#1 stealth on ships do NOT work, they are not invisible, there was a phase in tank development the leopard 1 is a prime example with the same school of thought, we can see them first and shoot'em first, they came up with 'nah, this shit do not work, lets put some armor back on.' there have however been no naval engagements to prove either way, but my gut feeling is some armor is better than no armor, and it will be a bloody massacre.

#2 lowered RCS or other signatures is all good and well...but not if it breaks EVERYTHING else(zumwalt), and my argument is that it is of questionable advantage compared to armor, the one does not exactly exclude the other though.

nemo: and at what standoff range would a zumwalt be wrecked? that armor at least gives the ship some distance to shoot the missile down, now, we do not know the exact numbers on the effects of nukes, but crossroads gives us a ballpark, given that piggie outside the turret died 2 days later the initial thermal/kinetic waves did not kill it...

found a little program that might be reasonably accurate.
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
500 REM range is about 5 Gy, so for a shipwreck(upper estimate, 500kt) against a unarmored ship, about 2.2km, that gives us a number to work with to figure out initial radiation burst.
so assuming these numbers, a shipwreck at 150m would dish out 1075.5Gy, so about eleven inch of steel(or less of more advanced stuffs, lets say 12 for good measure) would do the trick, problem is it would have to be omni directional, thereby heavy as bloody hell, but doable.
and on the under ship explosion, assuming it explodes UNDER the ship, and throws it up, given enough depth and tough enough sealed vessel, it should just bob back up a bit worse for wear, not exactly under? push it to the side, most of the ships in Baker shot survived just fine....the question is crew survivability, difficult to be sure here, but probably tricky.

so a 12 inch armor(as long as it is from the side, Iowa would qualify with 12.1 inch belt armor) could survive a shipwreck at 150m, a zumwalt would suffer crew death at 2km.
no armor is effing stupid.

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by Zakharra »

Since the conversation has nukes, assuming some armor is added (I agree, some of is better than none, otherwise the ships aren't much better than armed merchant vessels) what would it take to put reasonable radiation shielding in areas of the ships? Is it feasible?

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Re: Zumwalt: Stealth and Armor in Modern Naval Combat

Post by pinheadh78 »

Stealth tank you say? The Polish army is working on one
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/is-pol ... 1554395391

Personally I don't like the idea ;tanks are very dirty and abused in cross country and small-arms/heavy-weapons hits. I dont think that Polish stealth tank would stay stealthy for long.

Ships on the other hand operate in relatively clean environments on the ocean where you need to worry about salt, corrosion, water, and whatever stuff is floating on the water.

Also; I didn't dance around the argument, just pointed out that if your enemy can see you they can also hit you. And even if you can shrug off the first or second hit and keep fighting eventually a mission-kill will be achieved. The way to avoid that fate is to have low observable ship with enough armor to shrug off small arms and either evade or shoot-down inbound threats; and of course work as a team with the other ships and assets around you. As noted earlier that once the conflict goes nuclear then don't expect armor to save the ship as repeated nuclear near-misses would achieve mission-kill.

Its also telling that almost universally modern surface combatants are being built with stealth features as standard; and those are actual Navy's that have to face the real-world threat.

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