So endemic has this situation become, that in fact even if such heavily armored warships were ever wanted for some reason, the factories no longer exist that can roll out such thick armor plating, and this is why such ships as the surviving Iowa's constitute such a potentially valuable resource in the unlikely event that such a battlewagon that can take it, as well as dish it out, might ever be required again. The results of failure can be seen in the loss of HMS Sheffield at the Falklands (one hit by an Exocet missile completely gutted the ship!). Instead, ships depend exclusively on the ability and requirement to get in the first punch in order to win in any confrontation. In fact, this situation became even more aggravated after the war, and as far as I know, just about all post-war ships have virtually no armor at all. The fact is, with the power of the weaponry in use in WW2, it became quite clear to all and sundry that whoever got in the first hits, generally won the battle. It got the Japanese in trouble for a number of their ships, when the welds started to crack under the strains produced by heavy seas, and a number of their ships spent a long time in drydock having various modifications and repairs done to correct these problems (which generally increased their weight quite dramatically!).īut all that is neither here, nor there. By WW2, there was really not much to choose between the armor used by various nations to build their warships, but it should be noted that, unlike everyone else, the Japanese often used armor to provide girder strength for their hulls (structural support), while everyone else essentially 'hung' armor plates onto hulls that were internally supported (this was viewed as a weight-saving measure by the Japanese). ![]() ![]() There were a variety of steels used for armor during he age of the dreadnought, incuding Bessemer, Harveyized, face-plated, and Krupp, and several others as well.
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