King George V and Lion armor thickness and citadel height error

[DeliciousFart]

Time to join the nerds and make my own armor model error thread. 

So firstly for some background. In Britain the armor plates are ordered in pounds. 1 square foot of steel is about 40.8 lbs, so in Britain armor is usually given in multiples of 40 lbs (only Britain did this, I think). This means the 600 lbs belt armor around the magazines in the KGV is actually 14.7 inch, or 373 mm, and the 560 lbs armor belt by the machinery is actually 13.7 inch, or 348 mm. Whereas in the US a "40 lb" plate is actually 1 inch thick, or 40.8 lb, and the steel was usually given in 1/8th inch, or 5 lb increments. Anyways, this means that the current in game armor thicknesses on the KGV and Lion of 381 mm is incorrect. You can see this in the Garzke and Dulin images of the KGV and Lion armor. Someone on this forum posted it a while back and I found them just now.

 

So I checked out the KGV and Lion modules and hitboxes on gamemodels3d and I noticed that they both have citadels completely below the waterline. Not to sound facetious, but I find it rather amusing that the Iowa and Montana had ahistorically high citadels at the beginning while the RN had ahistorically low citadels now. Hmmmmm

 

Although to be fair at deep load the KGV citadel might have been right at the waterline. Lion though, no way.

 

On the other hand, the Lion weather deck is too thin. Right now it's 32 mm which lets it be overmatched by Yamato shells and penned by heavy cruiser fire. It's supposed to be 22+19 for a total of 41 mm. Even if you use the laminated plate formula the effective thickness should be 34 mm. Either way it will allow you to bounce Yamato shells on the weather deck.

 

Rule Britannia?

[HowitzerBlitzer]

I knew British citadels would be high thanks to those armour belts being so high out of water! Looks like these ships will be easy work to take out.

[mofton]

The armor thickness point is an interesting find, but somewhat irrelevant in game. The firepower-armor paradigm is such that mm don't count for much.

Citadel height needing lowering is a result of game mechanics, which favor close-range, high penetration, high hit percentage results.

[UncannyTransmition]

Yea uh. This has been covered ad naseum. Dulin's depiction is fairly mundane I would rarely use any of those documents for RN naval specifics They are however great For USN. With RN they tend to be very simplistic and give little of the full picture. KGV's machinery and magazines were probably the deepest that could possibly be done without physically building a battleship out of an iceberg. If we were to go full history autism with this game we might aswell start including the reality that RN class A plate was of such superior quality that when an american plate was 12 inches thick an equivalent thickness RN plate might be 18in effectively despite having the same thickness according to some sources who used USN plate as a basis. For obvious reasons this would be absurd in a vidyagame. 

[DeliciousFart]

50 minutes ago, UncannyTransmition said:

Yea uh. This has been covered ad naseum. Dulin's depiction is fairly mundane I would rarely use any of those documents for RN naval specifics They are however great For USN. With RN they tend to be very simplistic and give little of the full picture. KGV's machinery and magazines were probably the deepest that could possibly be done without physically building a battleship out of an iceberg. If we were to go full history autism with this game we might aswell start including the reality that RN class A plate was of such superior quality that when an american plate was 12 inches thick an equivalent thickness RN plate might be 18in effectively despite having the same thickness according to some sources who used USN plate as a basis. For obvious reasons this would be absurd in a vidyagame. 

 

British cemented armor is only about 10% superior to USN Class A, while homogeneous is not much different at all. In fact, reason USN used homogenous for lower belt is that at oblique impacts homogenous armor is better than cemented armor like Class A. Magazines, yes. Machinery, not quite. Here's the Vanguard's, which is not too different from the KGV and Lion.

 

 

Well above the waterline at least at standard displacement. Even at deep displacement I'd imagine it would still peek over quite a bit.

[Carl]

@UncannyTransmition the magazines in game are where they're supposed to be. Incidentally that image your using is almost certainly a mislabeled lion image. One of the explicit improvements of vanguard and the planned lions was 38mm splinter protection around the magazines. The KGV's didn't have that.

 

@DeliciousFart Whilst as my point about mislabeled images shows there's clearly the ability for british record keeping to f it up every source i've ever read myself on the KGV's has stated the thicknesses in game. Given they almost certainly draw from a variety of different source documents i suspect they're acurratte. You're not wrong on the cit. But it's one of the concessions they've had to make, realistically speaking KGV and Lion should be a tier lower, but they've dunked the cit height, amongst other things, to let them up tier them.

[Hunter_Steel]

9 hours ago, HowitzerBlitzer said:

I knew British citadels would be high thanks to those armour belts being so high out of water! Looks like these ships will be easy work to take out.

Actually no, the British Citadels are low. So they won't be easy to take out.

 

~Hunter

[BBsquid]

8 hours ago, UncannyTransmition said:

f we were to go full history autism with this game we might aswell start including the reality that RN class A plate was of such superior quality that when an american plate was 12 inches thick an equivalent thickness RN plate might be 18in effectively despite having the same thickness according to some sources who used USN plate as a basis. 

Might want to put the lid back on that Sharpie...I think the fumes have muddled your comparison. RN armor was not made of Stalinium.

[Big_Spud]

The quality of British armor varied massively anyways, since the Navy essentially never refused low quality plate, instead opting to buy it at a lower price. The USN by comparison, wouldn't accept plates that deviated more than 4% from the required specs. 

 

Basically the belt of a modern British battleship could have conceivably looked like a patchwork quilt of varying plate quality, much like the early USN dreadnoughts.

 

Either way, the differences in plate thickness ingame and those of real life are effectively so insignificant as to make zero difference during gameplay. What sort of bugs me is the citadel. It being lower over the magazines makes sense, but it should "step" up over the machinery spaces.

[Sakuzhi]

58 minutes ago, Big_Spud said:

What sort of bugs me is the citadel. It being lower over the magazines makes sense, but it should "step" up over the machinery spaces.

Is what I was thinking.

[creamgravy]

I posted this a while back. They've just cut off the top of the boiler rooms, not a huge issue compared to many others.

 

Spoiler

 

[Sakuzhi]

1 minute ago, creamgravy said:

 

I posted this a while back. They've just cut off the top of the boiler rooms, not a huge issue compared to many others.

 

The interesting part about that, is the Belt is only 13.7" Thick at the amidships.

 

Should be interesting to see how WG handles the Belt as they generally don't do tapering lengthwise all that well (The Indy is a good example)

[Big_Spud]

10 minutes ago, Sakuzhi said:

The interesting part about that, is the Belt is only 13.7" Thick at the amidships.

 

Should be interesting to see how WG handles the Belt as they generally don't do tapering lengthwise all that well (The Indy is a good example)

They can manage bands of differing thickness rather well in place of tapering. I wish I was at home to post a picture of the belt on the armor model.

[HowitzerBlitzer]

4 hours ago, Hunter_Steel said:

Actually no, the British Citadels are low. So they won't be easy to take out.

 

~Hunter

Nelson's armour belt is right at citadel level, so that's another one which is pretty high.

I'm not seeing lower than average citadels anywhere, and the deck armour on most ships doesn't seem the best, so if it's low I don't think it's going to help much at range.

 

[DeliciousFart]

10 hours ago, Carl said:

@UncannyTransmition the magazines in game are where they're supposed to be. Incidentally that image your using is almost certainly a mislabeled lion image. One of the explicit improvements of vanguard and the planned lions was 38mm splinter protection around the magazines. The KGV's didn't have that.

 

@DeliciousFart Whilst as my point about mislabeled images shows there's clearly the ability for british record keeping to f it up every source i've ever read myself on the KGV's has stated the thicknesses in game. Given they almost certainly draw from a variety of different source documents i suspect they're acurratte. You're not wrong on the cit. But it's one of the concessions they've had to make, realistically speaking KGV and Lion should be a tier lower, but they've dunked the cit height, amongst other things, to let them up tier them.

 

Which source is that? According to Nathan Okun and Garzke and Dulin the belt of the KGV by the magazines is 14.7 inch. If anyone here has books can they check?

[Sakuzhi]

2 minutes ago, DeliciousFart said:

 

Which source is that? According to Nathan Okun and Garzke and Dulin the belt of the KGV by the magazines is 14.7 inch. If anyone here has books can they check?

The citadel is also the machinery which is only 13.7" 

[Carl]

You'd have to dig around on where what came from Probably the people to get in touch with are the ones running navypedia as they tend to have a lot of details you can;t find anywhere else. I will note WG'ing is working from documents acquired directly from the RN. I'd expect the Rn to know what it's ships of yore where built like, but as noted a record keeping fubar isn't entirely impossible.

[DeliciousFart]

15 minutes ago, Carl said:

You'd have to dig around on where what came from Probably the people to get in touch with are the ones running navypedia as they tend to have a lot of details you can;t find anywhere else. I will note WG'ing is working from documents acquired directly from the RN. I'd expect the Rn to know what it's ships of yore where built like, but as noted a record keeping fubar isn't entirely impossible.

 

Found another drawing of KGV.

 

 

Again, it shows 600 lb. I just checked Friedman (can't believe my local library has this gold) and he gave 15/14 for magazine/machinery, but no mm values.

[Hunter_Steel]

16 hours ago, HowitzerBlitzer said:

Nelson's armour belt is right at citadel level, so that's another one which is pretty high.

I'm not seeing lower than average citadels anywhere, and the deck armour on most ships doesn't seem the best, so if it's low I don't think it's going to help much at range.

 

In game most likely different. The OP was talking about them in game being like that with ahistorically low citadels and the Americans at ahistorically high citadels.

 

~Hunter

[Carl]

In game Nelson is full height atm.

 

 

[DeliciousFart]

Also, they got the weather deck thickness wrong. It should be 22+19 for a total of 41 mm, instead of the 32 mm it has right now. It will have the same problem as Izumo in terms of dealing with heavy cruiser HE spam, and it can get overmatched by Yamato.

[Aetreus]

2 minutes ago, DeliciousFart said:

Also, they got the weather deck thickness wrong. It should be 22+19 for a total of 41 mm, instead of the 32 mm it has right now. It will have the same problem as Izumo in terms of dealing with heavy cruiser HE spam, and it can get overmatched by Yamato.

Armor plates don't add linearly. Rule of thumb, summative plate effective thickness is c^1.4 = a^1.4 + b^1.4

[DeliciousFart]

1 minute ago, Aetreus said:

Armor plates don't add linearly. Rule of thumb, summative plate effective thickness is c^1.4 = a^1.4 + b^1.4

 

They're directly laminated, not spaced. Even so, using that formula the weather deck should be 34 mm, which would prevent overmatch by Yamato shells and HE damage from 203 mm cruisers.

[Aetreus]

Just now, DeliciousFart said:

They're directly laminated, not spaced. Even so, using that formula the weather deck should be 34 mm, which would prevent overmatch by Yamato shells and HE damage from 203 mm cruisers.

That's for laminated plates. Spaced plates are worse. I'd bet they're deliberately dropping it to allow HE from 203mm cruisers, just because resistance to that and 155mm IFHE is an important breakpoint in the game balance.

[DeliciousFart]

1 minute ago, Aetreus said:

That's for laminated plates. Spaced plates are worse. I'd bet they're deliberately dropping it to allow HE from 203mm cruisers, just because resistance to that and 155mm IFHE is an important breakpoint in the game balance.

 

Overmatch by Yamato shells though? The bow and stern sections are probably still thinner.