Did ships use other material before the metal plating in order to slow down/disrupt the incoming projectile. Something like another ductile material or some form of space armor?
Good stuff. Did you happen to note the amount of glass "spall" being passed through the cardboard backer in test 3? In the wild, the spall would be fast and heavy and able to do a lot of damage to wires, pipes, and carbon-based life forms.
@@tonyennis1787 in the slow motion you can see the glass plate throws a lot of spall back from the impact site, even more went inward. Relatively little if any made it through the combined plate :)
Considering that the most powerful battleship guns ever built, such as the 16”/50, the 15” on the Littorios and of course the Japanese 18.1”, could penetrate most if not all belt armour ever put on a ship at most reasonable battle ranges, exactly how much belt armour of the highest quality naval steel would you need to withstand those kinds of hits?
@@m8rshall One of my Professors told us that the key to being successful in Engineering is being smart enough to know when you're out of your depth, and humble enough to ask for help.
I feel ashamed that I looked at this and thought "damn, only 20 minutes long" shout out to any other engineers who would enjoy a 8 hour seminar on metallurgical composition lol
The difference is those guys are being paid to natter on. Whereas drach is doing this for fun and acknowledges most people are actively resisting the urge to put themselves into a Coma after 2 hours of professor talk
I like the idea of showing this practical Hands-On science. I believe it'll be a great learning tool for anybody who is a young Naval enthusiast, who is just found this channel.😊
Excellent presntation Drach, I for one would be most interested in further videos on the types of materials used in Battleshipo construction. I would imagine that there are a number of differnts steels used in building a warship, as each has properties specific to the job they are required to do.
I think in his armor video he talks about the different types of steel used (like british BB armor was probably the best while american steel used in the general construction of ships meant that the american cruisers had the most protection overall for their class).
Not used in warships but some merchant vessels in WW2 which got labelled "plastic armour". After dunkirk it was realised some of the very old ferrys used in the evacuation had been surprising resistant to armour piercing bullets. Upon investigation the protection was found to due to decks being coated in asphalt. Asphalt being fairly hard gravel embedded in fairly soft bitumen. Admiralty wasn't happy with it being considered as amour, but it did get added to many merchant vessels and saved many lives. Might be interesting to see how pea gravel in tar stood up to BB pellet.
@@JamesThomas-gg6il the tar is largely in-between the gravel.so on impact a round would alternating between hitting very and soft material. Such Likely to cause considerable deflection of a small round. The tar would also help support/cushion rear of individual gravel lumpsl, helping the lump bleed off more of the projectiles energy before shattering.
@@stevecummins324 hey makes sense to me. How about sand as a buffer between two layers. Yes it would need a bunch of sand but sand bags work wonders even against full bore rifle rounds. Just an idea, not that any body that makes armor would take advice from an idiot like me.
I recall reading that this was researched by the British, and they found that a composite of Portland stone (very hard bluestone) and a matrix worked very well, and was of course much cheaper and quicker to produce than steel armour. Used on converted merchant carriers among other ships.
I'm interested - Had you ever made a video about the beginnings and the development of compartmentalization? It's a pretty important concept which contributes greatly to the survivability of ships, so i hope you had covered it already.
I don't remember if it was a specific video but he makes a few points about it when he talks about the damage some german cruisers sustained at the battle of Jutland and how british cruisers had even more compartments (in some cases) despite suffering from a case of "sudden explosions" due to bad ammunition handling practices. So his Jutland specials could be of interest. Also some of the guides might have covered a specific ship ( i remember something about one of the british cruisers surviving around 20 big hits). Sorry about the vague references but the videos are rather old.
@@gusty9053I had actually recently reached the battle of Jutland episodes, but sadly the closest he got was talking about the practice of leaving blast doors open on British ships as a way to increase fire rate and the British shells being either too brittle or their fuses exploding too early to cause significant internal damage. He only mentioned things relevant to the video (something i fully understand). What i am more interested on is how people figured out the optimal size of a compartment (not that anyone had the perfect answer), the evolution of bulkheads, differences between navies and in the end - the impact of it on things ship related - from living on the ship to damage control and survivability.
Will you discuss Dahlgren’s armor penetration tests and the development of the Dahlgren gun? It’s an interesting topic I briefly delved in when discussing a Royal Navy v. US Navy pertaining to ironclads.
Designers of tank armour had to relearn this lesson. They found that a soft steel inner layer much reduced crew injuries from spalling off the hard outer armour.
As an engineer (sort of, my work history is all environmental compliance) with a second semester of materials science, I approve of this and look forward to more. Particularly if we can ever really understand what the US was thinking when it was hardening class A armor plate for cruisers to 60-80% of the total thickness.
Whatever it was thinking, US Class A armor at cruiser-grade thicknesses turned out to be the best armor in the world (along with Italian cruiser armor) against 6” and 8” shells in post-war tests. (And I haven’t ever heard anything about an 80% depth of hardening). It was only with battleship-grade thicknesses that the “thick chill” face hardening became a problem though. But US Class A battleship armor plates were hardened to more like 50-55% depth.
@@bluemarlin8138 I didn't remember the specific thickness, just that Nathan Okun had made similar comments about the extremely thick depth of hardening.
Me at 8 minutes in: “ooh is he going to demonstrate glueing cardboard to glass later?” Me at 15 minutes in: “nailed it!” I love the practical demonstrations that you do Drach and would love to see more.
Metallurgy is, as Yul Brynner said in The King And I, “a puzzlement.” But so is ballistics. As a curious person at the range, I’ve shot wood, rocks, bricks, watermelons and steel with rifles and handguns of various calibers. It’s always fascinating to see which ones explode melons and which ones just whiz right through, and which ones thump steel gongs hardest, which ones move the gong most and which ones actually damage the steel plates. Often the results are non-intuitive.
@@TomDog5812to be fair, it's not *just* KE that matters -- a surprising amount of the terminal characteristics can be attributed to projectile shape/cross section as well as its own deformation characteristics
Which is why "Karomojo" Bell was able to drop elephants using a little Mannlicher-Schoenaur carbine chambered in 6.5 Mannlicher. That and extremely precise shot placement.@@mrsteamie4196
Drach - I heartily second/ third / fourth… the comments about more of this type of presentation. It was a good “basic” explanation of a difficult subject, complete with visual demonstrations of the principles involved. I didn’t need to be a PE to understand it, and yet it didn’t feel dumbed down. Well done.
I think it's fair to mention that the British did experiment with using a Stiff Upper Lip as light armor to much success, but found that the additional upkeep in tea and pasties was untenable at sea especially with war time shortages.
Really enjoyed this scientific explanation of how armor works. I liked the practical demonstrations you did to help illustrate your points. So, of course I would be for more of these videos. If you get a chance to use TNT that would be a plus. 🤣
As a lifelong Pittsburgher who’s grandfather fought on Saipan and worked in the mills, rather proud to see so much Pittsburgh made iron being used. We are called iron city for a reason.
Fort Nelson NR Portsmouth is the home of the royal armorys cannon and big gun collection and they have a giant plate with some impressive holes in it .10inch thick about 6ft sq with lots of shots taken at it from different angles.worth a look at the whole museum as there's a battle ship cannon on the front lawn (as of a couple of years ago)
As a fellow engineer I salute your efforts, especially under the circumstances in the UK concerning rifles 😊 Yes Drach, please do investigate this matter further!
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Excellent Video. Very illustrativ to actually see it in done in the model. Thank you
A few more complex points concerning the differences between homogeneous, ductile plates and hard-faced plates: (1) Hard-faced plates (Harvey, KC, Compound, Chilled Cast Iron) are penetrated mostly by velocity, not the shell weight. That is, the weight term only increases by the 0.2 power (small) but the velocity effect of increasing thickness penetrated goes up with the 1.21 power (if damage to the shell kept the same for all hits). (2) For homogeneous, ductile plates (Mild Steel, Nickel-Steel, Krupp Chromium-Nickel-Steel, RHA, Non-Cemented Armor, Class "B" Armor, Special Treatment Steel, etc.) between 0.2 and 1.1 caliber thickness, the French 1890 De Marre Nickel-Steel Penetration Formula gives rather good penetration values (again, when shell damage kept constant) at right anglesd (not as good at other angles of impact) -- intertwines US Naval Proving Ground Dr. Hershey's WWII test data) using a De Marre Velocity Coefficient of ~1.22 to change from nickel to nickel-chromium armors. (Below 0.2 the plates have large dents or "dishes" form on impact and above 1.1 the hole made is by the shell nose "wedging" the armor sideways, while in the 0.2-1.1 region the shell nose forms small dishes, only wedges near the face of the plate, and forms thick triangular backward-bent triangular "petals" ringing the back of the hole (broken off much of the time). Here the total kinetic energy of the shell using both weight and velocity work in unison. So we get penetration proportional to [(weight) x (velocity-squared)] to the 0.714 power = (W)^0.714 x V^1.43. (Note that this velocity power is exactly double the penetration increase for all face-hardened plates. Interesting.) (3) The hard face of face-hardened plates is brittle and breaks apart as it is punched through the hole and out the soft plate back shock-absorbing region. The thicker the face layer, the greater SCALING sets in to make bigger shells hitting proportionately scaled-up plates of identical properties penetrate more and more easily. Krupp originally used a 35% hard face and this had only a relatively small scaling effect weakening the thicker plates against bigger shells 9yet afain, with constant damage). Thinner faces do have less scaling, but the difference is not large. Going OVER 35% rapidly increases scaling, to the detriment of armor being hit by larger shells, though against small, cruiser-sized shells, the scaling is always small and works to make such shells penetrate better, not worse. Italy's Terni Company seems to have figured this out and had its thick plates have thinner proportional faces -- one thickness in cm -- than its thin plates. US WWII "Thick Chill" Class "A" face-hardened armor had a 55%face to try to damage the superior US WWII AP shells and this degraded this armor's resistance against the larger AP shells, though it was still stronger than US WWI-era Class "A" armor.
I forget if it was the team of the USS New Jersey, or if I’m just making it up, which is why I’m asking the question. If you were in one of those iron/steel armoured compartments and an enemy shell didn’t penetrate, how “safe” would you be? Wouldn’t it just turn into one giant reverberating bell, shattering eardrums and soft tissue?
Oh so clever, you'd think you are an engineer. Oh, you are. Your analogue was very well done, it tempts me to ask you to progress this process with the question: what did they do to projectiles to try and counter this? Eg rounds that won't shatter and so forth, AP-C shells... I hope you managed to hoover up all the shrapnel in any case, it was fun watching you do what I did in the 80s with my BSA Airsporter in the name of science.
Collab with Taofledermaus? Get someone to make scaled battleship AP rounds, then test fire them at correspondingly scaled armour! Who's got a machine shop and some cordite? 😅
PhD Metallurgist here. This video and demonstration was great but I have a small constructive nit to pick. In Iron and carbon steels, the ductile to brittle transition temperature (DBTT) isn’t related to a phase change. These materials have a body-centered-cubic crystal structure throughout our temperature range of interest (cold oceans to very hot days). For these kinds of steels, the DBTT is related to the ability of crystal defects called dislocations to move within the material. Simply, dislocations are crystal defects that can move in your material when you put energy into the system (mechanical deformation and heat are forms or energy). If dislocations are mobile, your system is ductile (but softer) and can accommodate a lot of strain. If your dislocations are immobile, which can be a problem for certain grades of steel at lower temperatures (lower energy for dislocation movement), your material is brittle (but stronger). This is not to say that phase is not important to DBTT though! Steels with a face-centered-cubic crystal structure are much less susceptible to cold temperatures embrittlement because that crystal system has more slip systems for dislocations to move across.
A year or two back, I was looking in to the design choices made on the KGVs, and found that armor production was one of the bottlenecks. Some of the armor was subcontracted to a Czech firm, to ease the bottleneck. I looked at the armor produced for the cancelled South Dakota class in the early 20s: 13.5" vs 14.7" for the KGVs, and both were flat sided designs, rather than inclined. The greatest difference was, after the KGV design was revised, it's belt extended one deck higher. Cranked up the alt history generator, to create someone in the Navy Department, in 1922, suggesting to SecNav Denby " The Washington treaty will allow us to build battleships again in ten years. Let's keep all that very expensive armor that has been made for the South Dakotas, so it can be used in the future". When the future arrives, the North Carolinas are designed with sloped armor, so the armor that had been stored for 15 years can't be used. So FDR sends a note to the British naval attache at the DC embassy, asking if the Admiralty might have use of a large quantity of battleship armor, suitable for flat sided installation. Unfortunately, such a thrifty minded person did not seem to be in the Navy Department in 22. The SecNav annual report a few years later reported that the last of the armor that had been made for the :South Dakotas had been sold as scrap.
I like this idea but I am 90% certain that if the us navy still had that plate armor in the 30s, the North Carolina class & possibly the second South Dakota would have been designed to use that armor.
@@jacobdill4499 I thought about that. The US was building to the 35,000 ton limit. Using vertical 13.5" armor, vs new, and sloped, 12" would add a lot of weight. Given the rate that the US cranked out battleships, they did not seem to be armor production capacity limited, like the UK was. Looking at the build times for the KGVs, the first ship completed in good time, but the build times got longer and longer. Anson and Howe were laid down 6-7 months after KGV and PoW, but commissioned 18 months after KGV and PoW. Considering the rate the RN was losing battleships in 41, having those last two KGVs finished a bit earlier would have been nice.
US armour of the time wasn't as good as British armour, and the British knew that, and besides, 15-year old armour wouldn't be as good as the latest as a general rule anyway.
@@rupertboleyn3885 everything you say is true. However, as I remind my Canadian friend when he starts complaining about the 50 old DDs the US handed over to the RN in late 40, you use what is available. Belt armor bolts on, so the Admiralty could always change out the 13.5" when better material was available. I have read that the 14" on the KGVs was designed to fit the same cradle as the 13.5". Navweaps says 54 of the old 13.5s were still in inventory in 1939. What mongrels Anson and Howe could have been, with US belt armor from the South Dakotas, and guns from the Iron Dukes, Considering that, over the course of 41, the RN had lost Hood, Barham, Prince of Wales, and Repulse, and Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were disabled, a couple of mongrels may have been welcome.
Did ships use other material before the metal plating in order to slow down/disrupt the incoming projectile. Something like another ductile material or some form of space armor?
The only traditional example I can think of would be the Littorios which backed their armour belts with concrete, but warships have used additional layers of torpedo defences, coal bunkers, ballast and fuel tanks to slow down incoming shells before they pass through into the vital areas. Though any material that isn't steel plate (in terms of WW1 and WW2, not including modern composites etc) is going to have vastly reduced stopping power, so there would need to be a lot of it involved - which, of course, adds a lot of weight.
Pedantic correction: wood (and to a lesser extent carboard) isn't ductile. It doesn't plasticly deform much at all and doesn't strain harden. Instead it bends until it breaks suddenly, like a spring. For a true ductile material (like lead or copper), you'll see the material inelastically deform by a large amount. This means that, once deformed, it doesn't come back to true. But it van deform a lot before it breaks.
To be even more pedantic, ductility is about tensile stress, but in talking about impacts, this shouldn't (isn't?) really be relevant; you should be talking about malleability - compressive stress. Lead isn't ductile, or at least, it isn't very ductile, but it does have considerable malleability. However, I do tend to read "ductile" all the time when I expect to see "malleable", so this is clearly a thing with engineers (I am a scientist, not an engineer!).
Yes please on more "engineering level" Friday content. Regarding phase transition on early armor steels, wasn't it the (among other elements) addition of nickel that made the greatest improvement on ductility (irrespective of actual hardness) over temperature excursions?
I don't know whether the answer to your specific question is "yes," but based on my own research, I'd say it's plausible. My colleagues and I have done mechanical shock testing on a variety of alloys, & my role has been post-test characterization of the test samples & ejected fragments. The more nickel-rich alloys always seem to be more ductile & the difference becomes more pronounced the colder the temperature the experiment is performed at.
Excellent demonstration! I really feel like I understand the inclusion of wood backing now...turns out holding the armor plate together is a really valuable function! And it's probably much more effective at stopping splinters (rather than generating more) than I thought.
I would argue that wood is also brittle. It is not really capable of plastic deformation. The difference to cast iron and hardened steel is much rather, that it allows an insane amount of bending before failing and has a grain structure which constrains the break and prevents isotropic crack propagation. I mean - ok - you can compress wood without failure. But you can neither forge nor roll it. So it is ductile in some sense, but not isotropically so. Only in compression and only in some axes.
I think lignin acts as as matrix for the wood fibres, and some kinds of wood experience creep and plastic deformation. Propably not in milliseconds at low temperature, though. I also think wood dissipatates energy faster, so maybe a shockwave will not propagate as far is in steel (unless you split the wood along the grain.) Lower density propably leads to that only working out in your favour in some cases.
Robin Hood and the longbow yeomanry want to have a word with you. Wooden bows bend perfectly, and so do the arrows during flight. The whole wooden ship concept is about bending wood. 🙂 (you are absolutely correct; I just couldn't resist)
It's all relative, compared to a piol noodle wood is very hard and brittle, but compared to 1860's iron armour it's ductile, and then iron becomes the ductile material when compared to steel etc. 😀
📝 Summary of Key Points: 📌 Initially, hard and brittle materials like iron were used for naval armor, but they were prone to cracking and splintering, resulting in larger entry wounds and potential failure of the plates. 🧐 Tests using cardboard and plate glass demonstrated that while brittle materials may resist certain projectiles, they fail more spectacularly and allow for more damage to the ship. 🚀 A solution was found in bonding a softer, more ductile material to the harder, brittle material, which absorbed shock, reduced failure, and supported the armor plate even if it shattered. 🚀 Compound armor, Harvey armor, and C steel were developed to further improve the properties of naval armor. 🚀 Wooden backing was used in armor plates to catch fragments and enhance protection. 💡 Additional Insights and Observations: 💬 "Using a combination of brittle and ductile materials provides better protection than using a single material." 📊 No specific data or statistics were mentioned in the video. 🌐 No specific references or sources were mentioned in the video. 📣 Concluding Remarks: The video highlights the development of naval armor from the 1860s to World War II. It explains the drawbacks of using hard and brittle materials and demonstrates the benefits of bonding a softer, more ductile material to the armor. The use of compound armor, Harvey armor, and C steel further improved naval armor's properties. The video emphasizes the importance of using a combination of materials for better protection.
Chapter 1, “Stuff Matters”, M Miodownik, carries a very useful history/discussion of metallurgy, an easy and amusing read. Other chapters are equally valuable, especially a full treatment of “chocolate”.
This is the same principle with how bulletproof glass works. You've got the outer layers of tempered glass gradually reducing in strength as it gets deeper, with a transparent resin glueing the panes together.
Best form of advertising is what you did at the start. Normally I avoid ads, but yours was pretty cool. That is exceptionally rare for me to say BTW. Maybe a first. Good Job.
I thought the point of this video was to specifically show that's not correct - properly arranged armor can offer at least some level of protection when hit again.
The thing that I find funny is that the shooting segment works so well because he doesn't live in America so he doesn't have things like in AR-15 to be like. Hey, let's test how this armor goes! Love ya drach
It would have been interesting to see the backside of the bonded glass-cardboard "armour", and also perhaps a comparison of how much glass got through as compared to the plain glass experiment. Modern tanks have a liner of Kevlar or similar bonded fabric to catch splinters or spalls coming off the inside of the armour due to, e.g., squash-head (HESH) hits.
Ah the good days!!! like the gentle men below 1 spent over 30 years at the university, firstly growing cracks and then onto looking at ballistic impacts and what happens also making test pieces with students on what happens using several layers of steel plates and how they fail. As I said at the beginning the good days in the lab. Pity you are so far away as I still have small working machine shop and would love to carry out experimental work😁
104,000 views of this show about armor to me is amazing. Shows how focused your subscriber base is to your shows. Amazing! Have a Magical Day and Great 2024
This genuinely taught me something. Like yes I know naff all about military history (or didn't until I started watching this channel) but this is something so simpler and so cool that I now I know and I like how you actually demonstrate things.
The Challenger 1 has the equivalent of 4 FEET (1220 mm) fontal armour due to its composite construction. Armour is not hard at all, it's tough or simply strong. IT 80 (up to 6mm) is around 100 t inch sq and IT 100 is around 80 t up to as thick as you can roll it. Which in the case of the UK is now ZERO as we don't have any Ordinance Factories or steel mills left that can make it. Odd isn't it to think a 60 odd ton tank has more than double the frontal armour of the best battleship ever made.
Something that tank nerds talk about is triple-hardness steel (THA) - steel made from explosively bonding or rolling a very high-harness steel (~500BHN HHA) between two sheets of normal RHA. This is very tricky to do for various reasons, but can in theory create a structural steel that is much more thickness-efficient than normal RHA. The rough naval equivalent would be rolled compound armour - where cast iron was poured between two wrought iron sheets and then rolled. I think that it might also have been possible to chill the two outside sheets and get a slab of chilled/white iron between two pieces of wrought. The advantage of a triple laminate structure like this is that, if you're cunning, you can use both the front and back face to support the brittle interlayer and almost completely stop crack propagation. The disadvantages are things like complexity, cost, constraints on what sort of steel you can use (due to changes in size from quenching) and limits on the ultimate thickness that the plates can get to (from memory, modern THA can only be made about 50mm thick). All this is probably what kept the technology from being explored further in ships, and limits the use in tanks to this day.
I took my “Material Science” class 1st semester Junior year…first class in the morning…same semester I took what were, to me, much more interesting classes…Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics II, principles of machinery…managed a B, but didn’t focus on it by any means 😂
Royal Navy trials of the hardest substance known to man, dried Weetabix, failed due to the influence of seawater. Army trials of biscuits AB for tanks however proved successful hence the fine armour of the Challenger 3. The Royal Navy is now investigating the armour properties of hard tack biscuits at sea.
Ok so as a materials scientist studying (among other things) embrittlement of metals in extreme environments, but who knows nothing about naval metallurgy beyond your videos, I'd be super curious to learn more about any specific case studies where Harvey or Krupp steel armor experienced significant environmental damage. I'm thinking of processes like hydrogen embrittlement, corrosion, thermally-driven fatigue, or creep, especially over a long service life. Obviously those processes would change the mechanical properties of however thick the exposed layer is; but if there's any diagrams, images, or other characterization of the thickness & distribution of the damage, I think that'd be neat to see. And then also comparing that damage to case studies I'm more familiar with, e.g. in steels with more uniform hardness, or in structures like welds where the hardness varies at a joint as a necessary consequence of the production method, rather than as a deliberate choice to fulfill a design requirement.
I wonder if someone tried to pierce battleship armor with shape-charge explosive, like a gigantic version of anti-tank rockets. I think modern missiles like the Taurus and Storm Shadow could probably hole a battleship hull with their shape-charge warheads (this is for bunker busting).
Hi Drach, back in the nineties and naughties I was heavily into pistol shooting, and in the mid nineties the range I shot at (Christchurch NZ) was forced by land sale to change from a 'full danger area' range to being a 'zero danger area' one. This involved major earthworks for backstops, and an issue we had in designing them was that in a ZDA range you are not allowed to be able to see the sky from the firing line. If we had only utilized the firing line roof and backstop to accomplish this the backstop would have been impossibly high, so we came up with the idea of a vertical baffle sitting a couple of meters from the firing line. The next problem we had was what to make it from, and me being a fitter/turner/machinist I was the committee member lumbered with the job. I cannot remember where I got the idea (it's 30 years ago) but I came up with a sandwich of three sheets of 19mm marine ply with two sheets of 3mm mild steel, made some test pieces and took them to the range where everyone and their dog did their best to punch holes in them. When I dismantled one none had been able to penetrate the first sheet of steel and only one group (38super) were even able to put a crack in that first sheet. I then cut a cross-section through the other test piece and could clearly see how the fibres of the ply had increased the area impacting the steel.
Shotty job on that glue job Drach. Lots of air in there. :) But Awsome Vid. The engineering analog was spot on. We could do it better in the US because we have the right to have guns. And we could go from 22 cal up to 50 cal in the deminstration. But would love to see more.
Basically really hard materials are brittle. They will usually have a higher yield strength, but not necessarily a higher toughness (how much deformation energy it takes for the material to fail, it's the area under the stress-strain curve). Take martensite (quenched steel) for example: it's extremely strong and hard but also very brittle. There is almost no plastic deformation before failure, which means it's actually not very tough. Tempering that steel will make it less brittle (more ductile), and more tough. The longer its tempered, the more ductile it becomes. Eventually, the sweet spot is reached (maximum tougness for that composition) and continuing to temper will cause a reduction in toughness. Temper steel long enough and hot enough and you end up where you started before you forged/quenched. This is called annealing.
My navel is armored because of a cast-iron sailors stomach... oh; Naval. Nevermind Yes. If you like. This type of subject is great. Maybe elaborate on why brass is so prevalent in navies today; as an example.
😮 my comment has everything to do with your opener. The man on the left side of the screen, holding the sextant, is NOT pointing toward the SUN.😮 Bad monkey 🐒. You should know that❗️!
I, for one, would love this sort of practical and visual demonstration of the engineering behind ships. Thanks for the entertaining and educating video!
I was a very young Ensign when I first went to sea on a training cruise aboard a Spruance class DD when I overheard some bitching in the wardroom of the junior officers mess about how "the bulkheads on this ship su**". I asked why? "They are all mostly aluminum and if we are hit by anything as large as a 5" shell that also burns, they will burn that bulkhead like old cord wood. We will catch fire and all die a horrible death". Was this LT correct? Or was he just scaring the new Ensign because that is a fun thing to do to the new butterbar?
Ideally, you'd want a sheet of a material that's both extremely hard _and_ extremely tough, which would allow you to do away completely with the thick, soft, heavy backing layer. Unfortunately, materials that combine extreme hardness with extreme toughness are about as elusive as honest corporate executives.
4:42 as a former RN sailor, this reminds me so much of damage control training and whacking in wooden wedges whilst getting blasted with freezing cold water.
I wonder what would happen if hardened armor plate was chrome plated, specifically looking at min the ricochet angle of the projectile. Theory i have is is the surface roughness would cause the projectile to"turn" or slide increasing the surface area of force reducing the pressure/in2 and possibly effecting it enough to bounce because on a microscopic level the "spikes" on normal steel are like velcro, chrome hardness can be adjusted and layered....
I like to think you never mentioned this to Mrs Drach..... she just walks in see you shooting the panes from her greenhouse,and the cardboard box sections.. sighs and walks out the room lol ATB great vid
You run into much the same problem with knives and the hardness of the steel used. Intuition would dictate that the harder the steel, the longer it is able to hold a keen edge, and reality bears this out. However, eventually you run into a problem of edge damage that is the result of impact instead of abrasion, namely chipping and cracking. You can use the same tricks with knife steels as you can with Kruppstahl in warship armor, namely differential hardening. If you take two identical knife blanks, and you thru-harden one to a uniform high hardness, it will retain an edge fantastically cut after cut, but be vulnerable to chipping and cracking due to impact damage (and so is not suited for a cleaver type knife). However, if you take the other blank, leave the bulk of it annealed, and harden ONLY the portion of the blade that you will be honing to a sharp edge, you will create a knife blade that has superior impact resistance, while not sacrificing much in terms of ability to retain an edge. It would be interesting to see just how good of a knife steel an armor steel makes, and just how good of an armor steel a knife steel makes, because the similarities run straight to the core of trying to optimize for many of the same properties of the steel involved. I imagine that the armor steel would offer substandard abrasion resistance, while the knife steel would offer not as good resistance to sharp impacts, when they are used for purposes other than they were designed for, however the other characteristics I feel would still be favorable. Might be an interesting starting point for new armor and new knife steels, if there was some cross-pollination of metallurgical formulae between the two fields. Or maybe they end up right back with current offerings. I don't know because I'm not a materials scientist, but it seems like that's an avenue of investigation worth pursuing.
I'm not an engineer, but I believe the two upper holes are larger then the three lower holes are due to the slight angle discrepancy of the aimed gun. The larger the angle, the more damage from the projectile. Does that make sense? I know that later German tank armor was sloped, as were many other tanks during the latter stages of the war, to resist frontal attacks. But if you are firing directly at a target, the round will pass straight through. If there is a slight angle, the round actually will pass through slightly more material creating a larger hole.
I find it rather ironic that the technique of using differentially hardened steel wasn't immediately obvious to the Japanese Navy, because their sword smiths had been doing exactly that since around the 12th century!
![ผัวเถื่อน - ยูริ โตเกียวมิวสิค [ OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/P08ORRVDGl8/mqdefault.jpg)
Pinned post for Q&A :)
Did ships use other material before the metal plating in order to slow down/disrupt the incoming projectile. Something like another ductile material or some form of space armor?
Good stuff. Did you happen to note the amount of glass "spall" being passed through the cardboard backer in test 3? In the wild, the spall would be fast and heavy and able to do a lot of damage to wires, pipes, and carbon-based life forms.
@@tonyennis1787 in the slow motion you can see the glass plate throws a lot of spall back from the impact site, even more went inward. Relatively little if any made it through the combined plate :)
Considering that the most powerful battleship guns ever built, such as the 16”/50, the 15” on the Littorios and of course the Japanese 18.1”, could penetrate most if not all belt armour ever put on a ship at most reasonable battle ranges, exactly how much belt armour of the highest quality naval steel would you need to withstand those kinds of hits?
What sort of armor thickness would the Kirishima have needed to successfully resist the Washington's broadsides at Guadalcanal?
As a mechanical engineer for over 20 years, one thing I've learned is that you never can know enough about metallurgy.
As a fellow mechanical engineer - I fully agree!
Best choice? Just Know; that you don't know 😂
Metallurgy seems to me as one of the most complicated sciences.
It includes so much math, physics, and chemistry.
@@chudleyflusher7132So you're telling me I love metallurgy
@@m8rshall One of my Professors told us that the key to being successful in Engineering is being smart enough to know when you're out of your depth, and humble enough to ask for help.
@@ghost307I think that's true of most sciences, medicine especially
I feel ashamed that I looked at this and thought "damn, only 20 minutes long" shout out to any other engineers who would enjoy a 8 hour seminar on metallurgical composition lol
The difference is those guys are being paid to natter on. Whereas drach is doing this for fun and acknowledges most people are actively resisting the urge to put themselves into a Coma after 2 hours of professor talk
If you really are an engineer then you rather hold your own presentation to the doggies at home;)
Hey, Drach explains it clearer than my Mechanics of Materials Professor
@@totalwar1793do you have a young one or old one? Almost all my materials profs are dinosaurs xD
@@mrsteamie4196 He's in his 50s
I like the idea of showing this practical Hands-On science. I believe it'll be a great learning tool for anybody who is a young Naval enthusiast, who is just found this channel.😊
Excellent presntation Drach, I for one would be most interested in further videos on the types of materials used in Battleshipo construction. I would imagine that there are a number of differnts steels used in building a warship, as each has properties specific to the job they are required to do.
I think in his armor video he talks about the different types of steel used (like british BB armor was probably the best while american steel used in the general construction of ships meant that the american cruisers had the most protection overall for their class).
Not used in warships but some merchant vessels in WW2 which got labelled "plastic armour". After dunkirk it was realised some of the very old ferrys used in the evacuation had been surprising resistant to armour piercing bullets. Upon investigation the protection was found to due to decks being coated in asphalt. Asphalt being fairly hard gravel embedded in fairly soft bitumen. Admiralty wasn't happy with it being considered as amour, but it did get added to many merchant vessels and saved many lives.
Might be interesting to see how pea gravel in tar stood up to BB pellet.
Some steel body armor plates are coated with a substance similar to asphalt in order to "capture" bullet spall as well. Very interesting.
So asphalt is the binding material? Like is it sandwiched in between or more of a coating?.
@@JamesThomas-gg6il the tar is largely in-between the gravel.so on impact a round would alternating between hitting very and soft material. Such Likely to cause considerable deflection of a small round.
The tar would also help support/cushion rear of individual gravel lumpsl, helping the lump bleed off more of the projectiles energy before shattering.
@@stevecummins324 hey makes sense to me. How about sand as a buffer between two layers. Yes it would need a bunch of sand but sand bags work wonders even against full bore rifle rounds. Just an idea, not that any body that makes armor would take advice from an idiot like me.
I recall reading that this was researched by the British, and they found that a composite of Portland stone (very hard bluestone) and a matrix worked very well, and was of course much cheaper and quicker to produce than steel armour. Used on converted merchant carriers among other ships.
I'm interested - Had you ever made a video about the beginnings and the development of compartmentalization? It's a pretty important concept which contributes greatly to the survivability of ships, so i hope you had covered it already.
I don't remember if it was a specific video but he makes a few points about it when he talks about the damage some german cruisers sustained at the battle of Jutland and how british cruisers had even more compartments (in some cases) despite suffering from a case of "sudden explosions" due to bad ammunition handling practices. So his Jutland specials could be of interest. Also some of the guides might have covered a specific ship ( i remember something about one of the british cruisers surviving around 20 big hits). Sorry about the vague references but the videos are rather old.
@@gusty9053I had actually recently reached the battle of Jutland episodes, but sadly the closest he got was talking about the practice of leaving blast doors open on British ships as a way to increase fire rate and the British shells being either too brittle or their fuses exploding too early to cause significant internal damage. He only mentioned things relevant to the video (something i fully understand).
What i am more interested on is how people figured out the optimal size of a compartment (not that anyone had the perfect answer), the evolution of bulkheads, differences between navies and in the end - the impact of it on things ship related - from living on the ship to damage control and survivability.
Will you discuss Dahlgren’s armor penetration tests and the development of the Dahlgren gun?
It’s an interesting topic I briefly delved in when discussing a Royal Navy v. US Navy pertaining to ironclads.
15 min? Duck tile?.....hard to get them feathered suckers to stay on the hull where you put them.
Moar glue! A big benefit of duck tile armour is the additional buoyancy, though.
@@thewheelieguy ah...yes, I believe your right...
That’s why you attach them with duck tape.
Designers of tank armour had to relearn this lesson. They found that a soft steel inner layer much reduced crew injuries from spalling off the hard outer armour.
Doesn’t the Abram’s also do the nifty diesel in between thing? Or am I making that up?
@@Meyer-gp7nqAbrams uses gas turbine engine, and the tank uses different compartment for ammo storage.
@@Meyer-gp7nq yeah there is fuel in a compartment between the driver and the front hull armor
@@muhammadnursyahmi9440 but they do not burn gas in the Abrams (usually diesel but they can pretty much burn anything)
As an engineer (sort of, my work history is all environmental compliance) with a second semester of materials science, I approve of this and look forward to more. Particularly if we can ever really understand what the US was thinking when it was hardening class A armor plate for cruisers to 60-80% of the total thickness.
Whatever it was thinking, US Class A armor at cruiser-grade thicknesses turned out to be the best armor in the world (along with Italian cruiser armor) against 6” and 8” shells in post-war tests. (And I haven’t ever heard anything about an 80% depth of hardening).
It was only with battleship-grade thicknesses that the “thick chill” face hardening became a problem though. But US Class A battleship armor plates were hardened to more like 50-55% depth.
@@bluemarlin8138 I didn't remember the specific thickness, just that Nathan Okun had made similar comments about the extremely thick depth of hardening.
the US had a hard-on for "SHATTER ALL THE SHELLS!" (and then making shells to try and pierce through those super hardened plates)
@@5peciesunkn0wn The USN armor and gun departments were practically running a one country arms race in the 20s and 30s.
@@shawnhamby9660 Yup lol.
Me at 8 minutes in: “ooh is he going to demonstrate glueing cardboard to glass later?”
Me at 15 minutes in: “nailed it!”
I love the practical demonstrations that you do Drach and would love to see more.
Spoiler!!!
Perhaps you mean, "glued it!"
Metallurgy is, as Yul Brynner said in The King And I, “a puzzlement.” But so is ballistics. As a curious person at the range, I’ve shot wood, rocks, bricks, watermelons and steel with rifles and handguns of various calibers. It’s always fascinating to see which ones explode melons and which ones just whiz right through, and which ones thump steel gongs hardest, which ones move the gong most and which ones actually damage the steel plates. Often the results are non-intuitive.
mxv squared.
@@TomDog5812to be fair, it's not *just* KE that matters -- a surprising amount of the terminal characteristics can be attributed to projectile shape/cross section as well as its own deformation characteristics
Which is why "Karomojo" Bell was able to drop elephants using a little Mannlicher-Schoenaur carbine chambered in 6.5 Mannlicher. That and extremely precise shot placement.@@mrsteamie4196
Drach - I heartily second/ third / fourth… the comments about more of this type of presentation. It was a good “basic” explanation of a difficult subject, complete with visual demonstrations of the principles involved. I didn’t need to be a PE to understand it, and yet it didn’t feel dumbed down. Well done.
I think it's fair to mention that the British did experiment with using a Stiff Upper Lip as light armor to much success, but found that the additional upkeep in tea and pasties was untenable at sea especially with war time shortages.
I am 78 years old and still learning things.
Really enjoyed this scientific explanation of how armor works. I liked the practical demonstrations you did to help illustrate your points. So, of course I would be for more of these videos. If you get a chance to use TNT that would be a plus. 🤣
Chocolate is similar to armor plate. It gets brittle when cold and soft when warm. And it can be tempered.
But a ship armored with chocolate would rapidly find itself denuded due to the crew being somewhat peckish...
@@davidg3944 cleaning up choco bits after firing BBs at it will be more fun than cleaning up broken glass. You just need an ice cream cone....
As a lifelong Pittsburgher who’s grandfather fought on Saipan and worked in the mills, rather proud to see so much Pittsburgh made iron being used. We are called iron city for a reason.
5:28 I thought ductile was a type of building materials used by aquatic birds for kitchens and bathrooms
Too funny
Fort Nelson NR Portsmouth is the home of the royal armorys cannon and big gun collection and they have a giant plate with some impressive holes in it .10inch thick about 6ft sq with lots of shots taken at it from different angles.worth a look at the whole museum as there's a battle ship cannon on the front lawn (as of a couple of years ago)
"Hard" and "soft" wood has to do with the seeds. Not the density of the wood itself.
Drach’s experiments always ramp up to the point the very planet is endangered ... I love this channel.
More educational videos sound good to me, so if you're willing to create them, I'll watch them.
Fascinating presentation for a layman. Thank Drach.
More of this? Not going to lie, it would be great!
As a fellow engineer I salute your efforts, especially under the circumstances in the UK concerning rifles 😊
Yes Drach, please do investigate this matter further!
Excellent Video. Very illustrativ to actually see it in done in the model. Thank you
You sir are an excellent teacher. I knew some of the reasons behind compound armour, your experiments demonstrate for even beginner's. Well done!
A few more complex points concerning the differences between homogeneous, ductile plates and hard-faced plates:
(1) Hard-faced plates (Harvey, KC, Compound, Chilled Cast Iron) are penetrated mostly by velocity, not the shell weight. That is, the weight term only increases by the 0.2 power (small) but the velocity effect of increasing thickness penetrated goes up with the 1.21 power (if damage to the shell kept the same for all hits).
(2) For homogeneous, ductile plates (Mild Steel, Nickel-Steel, Krupp Chromium-Nickel-Steel, RHA, Non-Cemented Armor, Class "B" Armor, Special Treatment Steel, etc.) between 0.2 and 1.1 caliber thickness, the French 1890 De Marre Nickel-Steel Penetration Formula gives rather good penetration values (again, when shell damage kept constant) at right anglesd (not as good at other angles of impact) -- intertwines US Naval Proving Ground Dr. Hershey's WWII test data) using a De Marre Velocity Coefficient of ~1.22 to change from nickel to nickel-chromium armors. (Below 0.2 the plates have large dents or "dishes" form on impact and above 1.1 the hole made is by the shell nose "wedging" the armor sideways, while in the 0.2-1.1 region the shell nose forms small dishes, only wedges near the face of the plate, and forms thick triangular backward-bent triangular "petals" ringing the back of the hole (broken off much of the time). Here the total kinetic energy of the shell using both weight and velocity work in unison. So we get penetration proportional to [(weight) x (velocity-squared)] to the 0.714 power = (W)^0.714 x V^1.43. (Note that this velocity power is exactly double the penetration increase for all face-hardened plates. Interesting.)
(3) The hard face of face-hardened plates is brittle and breaks apart as it is punched through the hole and out the soft plate back shock-absorbing region. The thicker the face layer, the greater SCALING sets in to make bigger shells hitting proportionately scaled-up plates of identical properties penetrate more and more easily. Krupp originally used a 35% hard face and this had only a relatively small scaling effect weakening the thicker plates against bigger shells 9yet afain, with constant damage). Thinner faces do have less scaling, but the difference is not large. Going OVER 35% rapidly increases scaling, to the detriment of armor being hit by larger shells, though against small, cruiser-sized shells, the scaling is always small and works to make such shells penetrate better, not worse. Italy's Terni Company seems to have figured this out and had its thick plates have thinner proportional faces -- one thickness in cm -- than its thin plates. US WWII "Thick Chill" Class "A" face-hardened armor had a 55%face to try to damage the superior US WWII AP shells and this degraded this armor's resistance against the larger AP shells, though it was still stronger than US WWI-era Class "A" armor.
Absolutely fascinating presentation. Thanks for showing the process and progression of damage management.
I forget if it was the team of the USS New Jersey, or if I’m just making it up, which is why I’m asking the question.
If you were in one of those iron/steel armoured compartments and an enemy shell didn’t penetrate, how “safe” would you be? Wouldn’t it just turn into one giant reverberating bell, shattering eardrums and soft tissue?
Oh so clever, you'd think you are an engineer. Oh, you are. Your analogue was very well done, it tempts me to ask you to progress this process with the question: what did they do to projectiles to try and counter this? Eg rounds that won't shatter and so forth, AP-C shells... I hope you managed to hoover up all the shrapnel in any case, it was fun watching you do what I did in the 80s with my BSA Airsporter in the name of science.
Collab with Taofledermaus? Get someone to make scaled battleship AP rounds, then test fire them at correspondingly scaled armour!
Who's got a machine shop and some cordite? 😅
PhD Metallurgist here. This video and demonstration was great but I have a small constructive nit to pick. In Iron and carbon steels, the ductile to brittle transition temperature (DBTT) isn’t related to a phase change. These materials have a body-centered-cubic crystal structure throughout our temperature range of interest (cold oceans to very hot days). For these kinds of steels, the DBTT is related to the ability of crystal defects called dislocations to move within the material.
Simply, dislocations are crystal defects that can move in your material when you put energy into the system (mechanical deformation and heat are forms or energy). If dislocations are mobile, your system is ductile (but softer) and can accommodate a lot of strain. If your dislocations are immobile, which can be a problem for certain grades of steel at lower temperatures (lower energy for dislocation movement), your material is brittle (but stronger).
This is not to say that phase is not important to DBTT though! Steels with a face-centered-cubic crystal structure are much less susceptible to cold temperatures embrittlement because that crystal system has more slip systems for dislocations to move across.
I would have loved to see follow up shots with the plastic BBs on the damaged composite armor.
There's a picture of the USS Texas BB-35 with teak on her sides just prior to her armor plate being installed.
Loving the format, topic and style. Thanks, Drach!
A year or two back, I was looking in to the design choices made on the KGVs, and found that armor production was one of the bottlenecks. Some of the armor was subcontracted to a Czech firm, to ease the bottleneck. I looked at the armor produced for the cancelled South Dakota class in the early 20s: 13.5" vs 14.7" for the KGVs, and both were flat sided designs, rather than inclined. The greatest difference was, after the KGV design was revised, it's belt extended one deck higher. Cranked up the alt history generator, to create someone in the Navy Department, in 1922, suggesting to SecNav Denby " The Washington treaty will allow us to build battleships again in ten years. Let's keep all that very expensive armor that has been made for the South Dakotas, so it can be used in the future". When the future arrives, the North Carolinas are designed with sloped armor, so the armor that had been stored for 15 years can't be used. So FDR sends a note to the British naval attache at the DC embassy, asking if the Admiralty might have use of a large quantity of battleship armor, suitable for flat sided installation. Unfortunately, such a thrifty minded person did not seem to be in the Navy Department in 22. The SecNav annual report a few years later reported that the last of the armor that had been made for the :South Dakotas had been sold as scrap.
I like this idea but I am 90% certain that if the us navy still had that plate armor in the 30s, the North Carolina class & possibly the second South Dakota would have been designed to use that armor.
@@jacobdill4499 I thought about that. The US was building to the 35,000 ton limit. Using vertical 13.5" armor, vs new, and sloped, 12" would add a lot of weight. Given the rate that the US cranked out battleships, they did not seem to be armor production capacity limited, like the UK was. Looking at the build times for the KGVs, the first ship completed in good time, but the build times got longer and longer. Anson and Howe were laid down 6-7 months after KGV and PoW, but commissioned 18 months after KGV and PoW. Considering the rate the RN was losing battleships in 41, having those last two KGVs finished a bit earlier would have been nice.
US armour of the time wasn't as good as British armour, and the British knew that, and besides, 15-year old armour wouldn't be as good as the latest as a general rule anyway.
@@rupertboleyn3885 everything you say is true. However, as I remind my Canadian friend when he starts complaining about the 50 old DDs the US handed over to the RN in late 40, you use what is available. Belt armor bolts on, so the Admiralty could always change out the 13.5" when better material was available. I have read that the 14" on the KGVs was designed to fit the same cradle as the 13.5". Navweaps says 54 of the old 13.5s were still in inventory in 1939. What mongrels Anson and Howe could have been, with US belt armor from the South Dakotas, and guns from the Iron Dukes, Considering that, over the course of 41, the RN had lost Hood, Barham, Prince of Wales, and Repulse, and Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were disabled, a couple of mongrels may have been welcome.
Ships are like onions 🌰
Did ships use other material before the metal plating in order to slow down/disrupt the incoming projectile. Something like another ductile material or some form of space armor?
The only traditional example I can think of would be the Littorios which backed their armour belts with concrete, but warships have used additional layers of torpedo defences, coal bunkers, ballast and fuel tanks to slow down incoming shells before they pass through into the vital areas. Though any material that isn't steel plate (in terms of WW1 and WW2, not including modern composites etc) is going to have vastly reduced stopping power, so there would need to be a lot of it involved - which, of course, adds a lot of weight.
There's a few oddities in the US civil war, the cotton clad ships where perhaps a form of space armour.
Drac, are shooting glass in the garage?. No I am conducting balistic resistant testing....
How about a collab of Drachinfel and the SloMo Guys.
And thank you sir, for this concise demonstration. 👍
Pedantic correction: wood (and to a lesser extent carboard) isn't ductile. It doesn't plasticly deform much at all and doesn't strain harden. Instead it bends until it breaks suddenly, like a spring.
For a true ductile material (like lead or copper), you'll see the material inelastically deform by a large amount. This means that, once deformed, it doesn't come back to true. But it van deform a lot before it breaks.
To be even more pedantic, ductility is about tensile stress, but in talking about impacts, this shouldn't (isn't?) really be relevant; you should be talking about malleability - compressive stress. Lead isn't ductile, or at least, it isn't very ductile, but it does have considerable malleability. However, I do tend to read "ductile" all the time when I expect to see "malleable", so this is clearly a thing with engineers (I am a scientist, not an engineer!).
You cheated. The 4mm bb was shot from a different angle than previous
conversely, this is why armor piercing bullets aren't good against targets like airplanes, overpenatration.
Outstanding presentation Drach! Thank you.
Yes please on more "engineering level" Friday content. Regarding phase transition on early armor steels, wasn't it the (among other elements) addition of nickel that made the greatest improvement on ductility (irrespective of actual hardness) over temperature excursions?
I don't know whether the answer to your specific question is "yes," but based on my own research, I'd say it's plausible. My colleagues and I have done mechanical shock testing on a variety of alloys, & my role has been post-test characterization of the test samples & ejected fragments. The more nickel-rich alloys always seem to be more ductile & the difference becomes more pronounced the colder the temperature the experiment is performed at.
Excellent demonstration! I really feel like I understand the inclusion of wood backing now...turns out holding the armor plate together is a really valuable function! And it's probably much more effective at stopping splinters (rather than generating more) than I thought.
I would argue that wood is also brittle. It is not really capable of plastic deformation. The difference to cast iron and hardened steel is much rather, that it allows an insane amount of bending before failing and has a grain structure which constrains the break and prevents isotropic crack propagation. I mean - ok - you can compress wood without failure. But you can neither forge nor roll it. So it is ductile in some sense, but not isotropically so. Only in compression and only in some axes.
I think lignin acts as as matrix for the wood fibres, and some kinds of wood experience creep and plastic deformation.
Propably not in milliseconds at low temperature, though.
I also think wood dissipatates energy faster, so maybe a shockwave will not propagate as far is in steel (unless you split the wood along the grain.)
Lower density propably leads to that only working out in your favour in some cases.
Robin Hood and the longbow yeomanry want to have a word with you. Wooden bows bend perfectly, and so do the arrows during flight. The whole wooden ship concept is about bending wood. 🙂
(you are absolutely correct; I just couldn't resist)
It's all relative, compared to a piol noodle wood is very hard and brittle, but compared to 1860's iron armour it's ductile, and then iron becomes the ductile material when compared to steel etc. 😀
Hurray 2 minute!
Blorb
📝 Summary of Key Points:
📌 Initially, hard and brittle materials like iron were used for naval armor, but they were prone to cracking and splintering, resulting in larger entry wounds and potential failure of the plates.
🧐 Tests using cardboard and plate glass demonstrated that while brittle materials may resist certain projectiles, they fail more spectacularly and allow for more damage to the ship.
🚀 A solution was found in bonding a softer, more ductile material to the harder, brittle material, which absorbed shock, reduced failure, and supported the armor plate even if it shattered.
🚀 Compound armor, Harvey armor, and C steel were developed to further improve the properties of naval armor.
🚀 Wooden backing was used in armor plates to catch fragments and enhance protection.
💡 Additional Insights and Observations:
💬 "Using a combination of brittle and ductile materials provides better protection than using a single material."
📊 No specific data or statistics were mentioned in the video.
🌐 No specific references or sources were mentioned in the video.
📣 Concluding Remarks:
The video highlights the development of naval armor from the 1860s to World War II. It explains the drawbacks of using hard and brittle materials and demonstrates the benefits of bonding a softer, more ductile material to the armor. The use of compound armor, Harvey armor, and C steel further improved naval armor's properties. The video emphasizes the importance of using a combination of materials for better protection.
My first thought after the first test was: well, why didn't you try to glue them together... and then you did.
This was a very effective demonstration. Well done!
Oh boy, this is going to be hideously technical! Sign me up!
Chapter 1, “Stuff Matters”, M Miodownik, carries a very useful history/discussion of metallurgy, an easy and amusing read. Other chapters are equally valuable, especially a full treatment of “chocolate”.
This is the same principle with how bulletproof glass works. You've got the outer layers of tempered glass gradually reducing in strength as it gets deeper, with a transparent resin glueing the panes together.
Timber backing is convenient for damage control, and just fixing to it generally in addition. Thank you for the demonstration.
Do I want to see more of this kind of thing??
Let's think about it for a moment.
Yes.
Best form of advertising is what you did at the start. Normally I avoid ads, but yours was pretty cool. That is exceptionally rare for me to say BTW. Maybe a first. Good Job.
Remember boys and girls armor only protects you on the first hit!
I thought the point of this video was to specifically show that's not correct - properly arranged armor can offer at least some level of protection when hit again.
Drach does failure modes, rather better than I recall from student days!
You need to hire an unpaid intern to clean up glass.
Please Drach can we have some more of these?
Enjoyed....thank you! In a future show, it would be interesting to know how riveted shell plating was made watertight.
Excellent demonstration. Can't really get enough of this. Maybe the @theslowmoguys could lend a hand with the filming.
The thing that I find funny is that the shooting segment works so well because he doesn't live in America so he doesn't have things like in AR-15 to be like. Hey, let's test how this armor goes! Love ya drach
It would have been interesting to see the backside of the bonded glass-cardboard "armour", and also perhaps a comparison of how much glass got through as compared to the plain glass experiment. Modern tanks have a liner of Kevlar or similar bonded fabric to catch splinters or spalls coming off the inside of the armour due to, e.g., squash-head (HESH) hits.
Have a like lol
Ah the good days!!! like the gentle men below 1 spent over 30 years at the university, firstly growing cracks and then onto looking at ballistic impacts and what happens also making test pieces with students on what happens using several layers of steel plates and how they fail. As I said at the beginning the good days in the lab. Pity you are so far away as I still have small working machine shop and would love to carry out experimental work😁
Material Engineer here... I just wonder how would modern, advanced steels work in thickness of battleship armor plates.
104,000 views of this show about armor to me is amazing. Shows how focused your subscriber base is to your shows. Amazing! Have a Magical Day and Great 2024
This genuinely taught me something. Like yes I know naff all about military history (or didn't until I started watching this channel) but this is something so simpler and so cool that I now I know and I like how you actually demonstrate things.
The Challenger 1 has the equivalent of 4 FEET (1220 mm) fontal armour due to its composite construction. Armour is not hard at all, it's tough or simply strong. IT 80 (up to 6mm) is around 100 t inch sq and IT 100 is around 80 t up to as thick as you can roll it. Which in the case of the UK is now ZERO as we don't have any Ordinance Factories or steel mills left that can make it. Odd isn't it to think a 60 odd ton tank has more than double the frontal armour of the best battleship ever made.
Thanks Drach, great segment. You did a awesome job with your substituted materials. 👍👍
Something that tank nerds talk about is triple-hardness steel (THA) - steel made from explosively bonding or rolling a very high-harness steel (~500BHN HHA) between two sheets of normal RHA. This is very tricky to do for various reasons, but can in theory create a structural steel that is much more thickness-efficient than normal RHA.
The rough naval equivalent would be rolled compound armour - where cast iron was poured between two wrought iron sheets and then rolled. I think that it might also have been possible to chill the two outside sheets and get a slab of chilled/white iron between two pieces of wrought.
The advantage of a triple laminate structure like this is that, if you're cunning, you can use both the front and back face to support the brittle interlayer and almost completely stop crack propagation. The disadvantages are things like complexity, cost, constraints on what sort of steel you can use (due to changes in size from quenching) and limits on the ultimate thickness that the plates can get to (from memory, modern THA can only be made about 50mm thick). All this is probably what kept the technology from being explored further in ships, and limits the use in tanks to this day.
Tl;dw: "Is soft and ductile armor better or worse than hard and brittle armor?" "Neither. Composite armor wins. Composites ALWAYS win."
I took my “Material Science” class 1st semester Junior year…first class in the morning…same semester I took what were, to me, much more interesting classes…Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics II, principles of machinery…managed a B, but didn’t focus on it by any means 😂
Royal Navy trials of the hardest substance known to man, dried Weetabix, failed due to the influence of seawater. Army trials of biscuits AB for tanks however proved successful hence the fine armour of the Challenger 3. The Royal Navy is now investigating the armour properties of hard tack biscuits at sea.
Ok so as a materials scientist studying (among other things) embrittlement of metals in extreme environments, but who knows nothing about naval metallurgy beyond your videos, I'd be super curious to learn more about any specific case studies where Harvey or Krupp steel armor experienced significant environmental damage. I'm thinking of processes like hydrogen embrittlement, corrosion, thermally-driven fatigue, or creep, especially over a long service life. Obviously those processes would change the mechanical properties of however thick the exposed layer is; but if there's any diagrams, images, or other characterization of the thickness & distribution of the damage, I think that'd be neat to see. And then also comparing that damage to case studies I'm more familiar with, e.g. in steels with more uniform hardness, or in structures like welds where the hardness varies at a joint as a necessary consequence of the production method, rather than as a deliberate choice to fulfill a design requirement.
I wonder if someone tried to pierce battleship armor with shape-charge explosive, like a gigantic version of anti-tank rockets. I think modern missiles like the Taurus and Storm Shadow could probably hole a battleship hull with their shape-charge warheads (this is for bunker busting).
Hi Drach, back in the nineties and naughties I was heavily into pistol shooting, and in the mid nineties the range I shot at (Christchurch NZ) was forced by land sale to change from a 'full danger area' range to being a 'zero danger area' one. This involved major earthworks for backstops, and an issue we had in designing them was that in a ZDA range you are not allowed to be able to see the sky from the firing line. If we had only utilized the firing line roof and backstop to accomplish this the backstop would have been impossibly high, so we came up with the idea of a vertical baffle sitting a couple of meters from the firing line. The next problem we had was what to make it from, and me being a fitter/turner/machinist I was the committee member lumbered with the job. I cannot remember where I got the idea (it's 30 years ago) but I came up with a sandwich of three sheets of 19mm marine ply with two sheets of 3mm mild steel, made some test pieces and took them to the range where everyone and their dog did their best to punch holes in them. When I dismantled one none had been able to penetrate the first sheet of steel and only one group (38super) were even able to put a crack in that first sheet. I then cut a cross-section through the other test piece and could clearly see how the fibres of the ply had increased the area impacting the steel.
Shotty job on that glue job Drach. Lots of air in there. :) But Awsome Vid. The engineering analog was spot on. We could do it better in the US because we have the right to have guns. And we could go from 22 cal up to 50 cal in the deminstration. But would love to see more.
Basically really hard materials are brittle.
They will usually have a higher yield strength, but not necessarily a higher toughness (how much deformation energy it takes for the material to fail, it's the area under the stress-strain curve).
Take martensite (quenched steel) for example: it's extremely strong and hard but also very brittle. There is almost no plastic deformation before failure, which means it's actually not very tough.
Tempering that steel will make it less brittle (more ductile), and more tough. The longer its tempered, the more ductile it becomes. Eventually, the sweet spot is reached (maximum tougness for that composition) and continuing to temper will cause a reduction in toughness. Temper steel long enough and hot enough and you end up where you started before you forged/quenched. This is called annealing.
My navel is armored because of a cast-iron sailors stomach... oh; Naval. Nevermind
Yes. If you like. This type of subject is great.
Maybe elaborate on why brass is so prevalent in navies today; as an example.
😮 my comment has everything to do with your opener. The man on the left side of the screen, holding the sextant, is NOT pointing toward the SUN.😮 Bad monkey 🐒. You should know that❗️!
I, for one, would love this sort of practical and visual demonstration of the engineering behind ships. Thanks for the entertaining and educating video!
I was a very young Ensign when I first went to sea on a training cruise aboard a Spruance class DD when I overheard some bitching in the wardroom of the junior officers mess about how "the bulkheads on this ship su**". I asked why? "They are all mostly aluminum and if we are hit by anything as large as a 5" shell that also burns, they will burn that bulkhead like old cord wood. We will catch fire and all die a horrible death". Was this LT correct? Or was he just scaring the new Ensign because that is a fun thing to do to the new butterbar?
Ideally, you'd want a sheet of a material that's both extremely hard _and_ extremely tough, which would allow you to do away completely with the thick, soft, heavy backing layer.
Unfortunately, materials that combine extreme hardness with extreme toughness are about as elusive as honest corporate executives.
4:42 as a former RN sailor, this reminds me so much of damage control training and whacking in wooden wedges whilst getting blasted with freezing cold water.
"The New Science of Strong Materials" by J. E. Gordon is pretty good at explaining why stuff works the way it does.
duc·tile | \ ˈdək-tᵊl , -ˌtī(-ə)l \
Definition
1 of a metal : capable of being drawn out into wire or thread
I wonder what would happen if hardened armor plate was chrome plated, specifically looking at min the ricochet angle of the projectile. Theory i have is is the surface roughness would cause the projectile to"turn" or slide increasing the surface area of force reducing the pressure/in2 and possibly effecting it enough to bounce because on a microscopic level the "spikes" on normal steel are like velcro, chrome hardness can be adjusted and layered....
I do recall December 1st 2023 to be a particularly amusing Friday across the English speaking realm.
I like to think you never mentioned this to Mrs Drach..... she just walks in see you shooting the panes from her greenhouse,and the cardboard box sections.. sighs and walks out the room lol ATB great vid
You run into much the same problem with knives and the hardness of the steel used.
Intuition would dictate that the harder the steel, the longer it is able to hold a keen edge, and reality bears this out.
However, eventually you run into a problem of edge damage that is the result of impact instead of abrasion, namely chipping and cracking.
You can use the same tricks with knife steels as you can with Kruppstahl in warship armor, namely differential hardening.
If you take two identical knife blanks, and you thru-harden one to a uniform high hardness, it will retain an edge fantastically cut after cut, but be vulnerable to chipping and cracking due to impact damage (and so is not suited for a cleaver type knife).
However, if you take the other blank, leave the bulk of it annealed, and harden ONLY the portion of the blade that you will be honing to a sharp edge, you will create a knife blade that has superior impact resistance, while not sacrificing much in terms of ability to retain an edge.
It would be interesting to see just how good of a knife steel an armor steel makes, and just how good of an armor steel a knife steel makes, because the similarities run straight to the core of trying to optimize for many of the same properties of the steel involved.
I imagine that the armor steel would offer substandard abrasion resistance, while the knife steel would offer not as good resistance to sharp impacts, when they are used for purposes other than they were designed for, however the other characteristics I feel would still be favorable.
Might be an interesting starting point for new armor and new knife steels, if there was some cross-pollination of metallurgical formulae between the two fields. Or maybe they end up right back with current offerings. I don't know because I'm not a materials scientist, but it seems like that's an avenue of investigation worth pursuing.
Anyone else notice booming noises throughout, especially at 8.42? Have noticed it recently on Drach's vids.
I'm not an engineer, but I believe the two upper holes are larger then the three lower holes are due to the slight angle discrepancy of the aimed gun. The larger the angle, the more damage from the projectile. Does that make sense?
I know that later German tank armor was sloped, as were many other tanks during the latter stages of the war, to resist frontal attacks. But if you are firing directly at a target, the round will pass straight through. If there is a slight angle, the round actually will pass through slightly more material creating a larger hole.
Please let this be a normal experiment!
With the Drach, no way!
Aww …
(Sung to tune of Magic School Bus theme song)
I find it rather ironic that the technique of using differentially hardened steel wasn't immediately obvious to the Japanese Navy, because their sword smiths had been doing exactly that since around the 12th century!