Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 09-16-2022, 07:24 AM   #21
Agemegos
 
Agemegos's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Battleship guns and armour demonstrated things about impactors with velocity less than about one kilometre per second. The hardness and tensile strength of materials are much less significant when you are dealing with two or three orders of magnitude more kinetic energy per unit mass, and everything behaves in collision like several times its own mass of detonating TNT.
__________________

Decay is inherent in all composite things.
Nod head. Get treat.
Agemegos is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 07:59 AM   #22
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Quote:
Originally Posted by The Colonel View Post
- no-one bothered to create a battleship grade HEAT round.

From memory I believe the most powerful HEAT weapon in HT is 6Dx15 (I think that's adding together multiple stages) and that would penetrate 45 inches of RHA.

I would judge that there are plenty of battleship grade HEAT rounds. If no one has bothered to devlope them for naval cannon that says something different i.e. about commoness of targets rather than capability of rounds.
__________________
Fred Brackin
Fred Brackin is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 08:13 AM   #23
The Colonel
 
The Colonel's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
From memory I believe the most powerful HEAT weapon in HT is 6Dx15 (I think that's adding together multiple stages) and that would penetrate 45 inches of RHA.

I would judge that there are plenty of battleship grade HEAT rounds. If no one has bothered to devlope them for naval cannon that says something different i.e. about commoness of targets rather than capability of rounds.
No-one bothered to create a battleship grade HEAT round - I've not even heard of prototypes being made. I suspect a big part of that was due to the limit usefulness of the penetration jet on a large, multicompartment target like a battleship. There was certainly scope for HEAT rounds to have been developed whilst there were still battleships to shoot at, but to the best of my knowledge, no-one thought it worthwhile.

Mind you, on a smaller scale, I think some of the Russian SUs were armed with smaller cut down naval guns and some of them fired HEAT, so it's possible you could have contrived to fire HEAT from a naval gun if you'd really wanted to.
The Colonel is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 08:26 AM   #24
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
From memory I believe the most powerful HEAT weapon in HT is 6Dx15 (I think that's adding together multiple stages) and that would penetrate 45 inches of RHA.

I would judge that there are plenty of battleship grade HEAT rounds. If no one has bothered to devlope them for naval cannon that says something different i.e. about commoness of targets rather than capability of rounds.
Would HEAT really be effective against a battleship? A tank is a relatively small target, and there's not a lot of space between the armor and the engine or only crew compartment. You hit a tank in the engine (or drivetrain), you've got a mobility kill. You hit a tank in the crew compartment, you basically get an explosion within said compartment and kill or incapacitate the crew.

But a battleship's engine is, from what I understand, deep in the ship, and has quite a few open spaces between it and the outside world. Meanwhile, while the corridors of a battleship are often cramped, there's a lot more volume involved than in a tank - you hit one of those, you'll only take out those crew members unfortunate enough to be close to where your weapon hit. I think against a battleship you're probably best off hitting it with a really bit explosion, rather than hitting it with a smaller, concentrated, directed one (like HEAT). But I could be mistaken.
__________________
GURPS Overhaul
Varyon is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 08:29 AM   #25
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Quote:
Originally Posted by The Colonel View Post
No-one bothered to create a battleship grade HEAT round -
Perhaps "battleship grade" means something technical to you that it does not to me. I was going with "capable of penetrating battleship armor" and there are many modern HEAT muniitions with that level of power.

More likely the laack of interest (besides the "not invented here" issue) was about firing HEAT rounds from high velocity rifled guns. The spin interfered with jet formation and this was not solved until the 60s or 70s.

Also, except for Tirpritz and its' psch war campaign to drive the British admiralty "Mad!, Mad I tell you!" there were no German capital ships left by hte time of the early HEAT warheads and the RN hadn't needed more penetration to destroy Bismarck.

In the Pacific it had become obvious that gun duels involving battleships would be quite rare.
__________________
Fred Brackin
Fred Brackin is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 09:28 AM   #26
Witchking
 
Witchking's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: The Athens of America
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Perhaps "battleship grade" means something technical to you that it does not to me. I was going with "capable of penetrating battleship armor" and there are many modern HEAT muniitions with that level of power.

More likely the laack of interest (besides the "not invented here" issue) was about firing HEAT rounds from high velocity rifled guns. The spin interfered with jet formation and this was not solved until the 60s or 70s.

Also, except for Tirpritz and its' psch war campaign to drive the British admiralty "Mad!, Mad I tell you!" there were no German capital ships left by hte time of the early HEAT warheads and the RN hadn't needed more penetration to destroy Bismarck.

In the Pacific it had become obvious that gun duels involving battleships would be quite rare.
I suspect by battleship grade he was thinking 'HEAT rounds for Battleship Main Guns' so 12'+ or over 305mm.

Since HEAT rounds were coming to be in WW2 at the same time that Carriers supplanted Battleships as 'Queens of the Sea'; I suspect that no BB HEAT rounds were made because post-1945 no BB's were made.
__________________
My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.-Foch
America is not perfect, but I will hold her hand until she gets well.-unk Tuskegee Airman
Witchking is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 10:51 AM   #27
johndallman
Night Watchman
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

WWII battleships had two main kinds of shell for the main guns: High-Explosive, for shore bombardment and attacking unarmoured ships, and Armour-Piercing Ballistic Capped, for attacking armoured ships. It became clear during WWII that their main role was shore bombardment, and they began to carry little or no APBC. IIRC, the US battleships at Surigao Strait got a chance to take on APBC ammunition before the battle.
johndallman is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 10:54 AM   #28
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

I suspect HEAT wouldn't do much against battleships, because by ground vehicle standards they actually have pretty thin armor for their size.
__________________
My GURPS site and Blog.
Anthony is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 11:20 AM   #29
Rupert
 
Rupert's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
From memory I believe the most powerful HEAT weapon in HT is 6Dx15 (I think that's adding together multiple stages) and that would penetrate 45 inches of RHA.

I would judge that there are plenty of battleship grade HEAT rounds. If no one has bothered to devlope them for naval cannon that says something different i.e. about commoness of targets rather than capability of rounds.
There are a number of large missiles with warheads that are HEAT or 'semi-HEAT', most of them anti-shipping or multi-role with anti-shipping as one of the envisaged roles. They have warheads comparable to a large naval shell of yesteryear.

The reason they weren't invented for big naval guns is simple - there was no point, because by the time they would have been fielded, those big guns were obsolete, and that was fairly clear at the time development would've started (mid-WWII). Also, there was simply no stand-out use case for them - against cruisers normal AP shells were perfectly adequate, and against smaller ships HE shells were more than adequate. Against battleships HEAT shells would've been of limited use because their after-armour effects are far too limited and fusing them so they go off on armour but not heavy plating would've been extremely challenging, and if they went off as soon as they hit hull plating they'd be worse than even (based fused) HE.
__________________
Rupert Boleyn

"A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history."
Rupert is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 09-16-2022, 11:32 AM   #30
Rupert
 
Rupert's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
Default Re: Spaceships hull armor…solid?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
I suspect HEAT wouldn't do much against battleships, because by ground vehicle standards they actually have pretty thin armor for their size.
Their guns were also quite small for their size - a WWII medium tank would have a gun of about 3" bore, and 50-70 calibres long. A WWII battleship would have main guns of 14-18" and about 45-50 calibres long (though they had many more, of course). The latter massed very roughly a thousand times to former.

So with 1000+ times the mass with guns only ~5 times the calibre and lower velocity into the bargain it's not surprising their main armour layers were relatively thin, especially as they could use their great size to hide some of their vital components behind many empty compartments to allow fragments and blast to dissipate before reaching them. Also, unlike tanks a warship's structural plating can provide protection from blast and fragmentation, because there's room for complementation, etc. (this, BTW, makes comparing ships of different times and navies hard, because the people designing them split up what counted as 'hull' or 'frame' or 'structure' vs 'protection' or 'armour' differently).
__________________
Rupert Boleyn

"A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history."
Rupert is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
armour, spaceships

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 08:31 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.