Deck Armors
The next step beyond the 360mm rebuild issue is deciding different ways of allocating Cleito tonnage in the future. This led to some tight draft ship designs and a desire to have- like other navies- a varied thickness of armor rather than an uniform amount.
Expecting that searches for things like “deck”, “armor”, and “average” would be useless, I started to try to find my own answer. Then I tried a search anyhow and found a rule of thumb on one of the returned pages. However I decided to finish my attempt. The rule of thumb I found was :
“IF I have thickness x I keep in mind that it should be x+40 or 50% over vitals and x-60 to 80% over the rest.”
I took copies of overhead views of Derfflinger, Erzazt Monarch, Valiant (1941) and Giulio Cesare (193
and scanned them, brought them up in the GIS, and drew polygons over the decks. I then chopped the polygons a little beyond the various main barbettes. This allowed me to derive what the relative amount of deck was taken up by A-X, or A-Y, or B-Y (4, 3, or 2 turrets).
For example: from just foreward of “A” to just aft of “X”, is 65% of Valiant’s length and 80% of her deck area. Given the % length, this would also be the amount for an AoN scheme, which I don’t believe any of these were.
The averages of the 4 ships is as follows
AoN : 80% area, 65% length.
4 turrets : 78% area, 61% length
3 turrets : 67% area, 52% length
2 turrets : 58% area, 44% length
So what I propose to do in my draft vessels plans is use the above numbers as guides.
For example, if an Erzatz Ijelsijk requires 1000 tons per 1” of armor, but has 3 turrets, I would apply it as
Citadel : 670 tons / 1 inch + ends : 330 tons/ inch. If I want the ends to resist HE/Light shells/GP bombs, I “spend” 660 tons for 2”, and then can “spend” 2680 tons for 4” citadel armor : 3340 total.
Does this sound like an acceptable methodology for folks? Or is there already an agreed on means of doing this squirreled away that I have missed?