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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3256 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 6, 2026

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not particularly vulnerable to drone and missile stikes

There have been several generations of armor and anti-armor development since WWII, and I wouldn't bet on the 12+ inch steel belts stopping modern weapons anywhere near as well as they used to. A modern, man-portable Javelin missile claims more armor penetrating power than the Iowa class was designed against, which at the time was something like a 16 inch shell that might have weighted well over a ton and left the barrel at 1700mph. Shaped charges had only started appearing during WWII.

I doubt anyone has ever tested it ("it belongs in a museum!") but I'd bet the latest AT weapons could penetrate a battleship turret. I believe this is part of why modern navy ships are armored only against much smaller shells and depend more on active protection systems.

Nah, AT weapons simply arent at a scale they can pose any threat to a battleship armor belt or turret faces. A javelin may have a spec 800 mm of RHA penetration, but the 12.1" Class A monolithic plate that makes up the main belt on an Iowa is something north of 1000mm RHA equivalent (though RHA equivalent testing is really only done for much thinner tank armor, not naval armoring). Also, there are a minimum of three layers of armor to penetrate the citadel (decaping plate, main belt, spall liner or bomb, main, and splinter decks) with feet of standoff distance between them, that alone would defeat an EFP warhead designed to punch through one layer of tank armor.

Modern naval ships are much less heavily armored for a wide variety of reasons, but armor not working isn't one of them. Economics, geopokitics, and submarines would be the big three IMO.

When I last looked at this, I was specifically looking at the turret armor, which doesn't have the extra layers of ship around it. It might be able to knock out a turret (with some luck on powder handling), but probably not the whole ship barring Jutland-type cascading failures Iowa's designers were aware of. But I also didn't really have much faith in comparing ballistic numbers from the 1920s with modern claims: it's unclear if "RHA equivalent" really is a static comparison and if all the sizes really scale linearly.

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