See also: Damage Saturation for an in-depth explanation.Ī ship has to be both a military base and a combat vehicle, since it is designed for long autonomous operations. As such, shells fired to strike the deck may be able to defeat the armor while those same shells may be incapable of penetrating the side armor of the target vessel. However, due to to a large area that would have to be protected, battleships' deck armor is much thinner than the belt armor. In addition to belt armor, which protects battleships from direct fire, they also have deck armor that protects them from plunging fire - shells at extreme engagement ranges tend to hit the top of the ship. The magazines are normally located just under the main caliber turrets. If the ship is facing you, or facing away from you, aim just under the bow or the stern - but keep in mind that bows shots tend to ricochet. As a rule-of-thumb, when you have a clear shot at the side of the ship, aim in the middle of the ship (just below the smokestacks), and close to the waterline. The citadel is normally located in the middle of the ship, and is roughly half the ship's length. How can a player know where these important compartments are when he or she fires into the side of an unfamiliar ship? Short of looking up ship's blueprint, an educated guess will have to suffice. Penetrating the citadel armor around the magazine often results in a spectacular one-shot kill. The ship's magazines are located in or around the turret barbettes, and contain the main caliber shells, as well as the gunpowder charges. In effect, the scheme accepts vulnerability to medium-caliber and high-explosive shells striking the unarmored sections of the hull, in order to improve resistance against the heaviest armor-piercing shells, while at the same time being able to carry a powerful armament and retain useful speed and endurance.įrom the citadel box, shafts known as barbettes lead upwards to the ship's main gun turrets and conning tower. This approach of providing either total or negligible protection is referred to as 'all or nothing'. Most of the other compartments are almost completely unarmored. Therefore, some later battleship designers tried to save some of that weight by placing heavy armor only around the vital parts of the ship: the ammunition and propellant magazines, the propulsion plant, the fire-control, command and communications sections. The armor tends to be very heavy: on a typical battleship it takes up around 40% of the total displacement of the vessel.

In this regard the developers attempted to adhere to historical realism and simulate all significant layers of armor. A projectile that enters the ship can encounter up to four or five layers of armor and may stop or ricochet at each layer.

Wwii ballistics armor and gunnery