Battleship design question: blowout panels?

So I was watching some videos about main battle tanks, armor and their protection systems and many tanks have blowout panels. Essentially a section in the magazines that in case of an internal ammo explosion from a critical hit, the resulting energy will be directed outside the tank and not destroy the tank. Or at least permit the survivability of the crew.

Many battleships were destroyed by magazine explosions. Was there a reason why this concept was not pioneered on battleships?
 
I think that is because on a ship, magazine are usually bellow water level. So redirecting the blow would still mean a hole in the hull, thus flooding the ship.
(but like Mike, i'm not a naval architect)
 
A lot of magazine explosions were caused by ignition of the charge propellant flashing down into the ammunition, often against safety rules (eg leave a hatch open for ease of access).

Magazines had bulkheads etc but when it blows up its going to sink the ship, regardless of where the force goes because...its a ship and if you blow the bow off or blow a hole in the middle of it they tend to sink

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
So it sounds like it was a bad idea on the fact there was no good place to put a blowout port/panel.

I suppose the closest idea would be something that blew and auto flooded the magazine, but would it not be vulnerable to incoming fire?

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
I suppose the closest idea would be something that blew and auto flooded the magazine, but would it not be vulnerable to incoming fire?

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

Ive heard of battleships flooding the magazines when there is an impending fire that threatens to destroy the ship. I beleive the USS Iowa flooded her magazines during her infamous turret explosion during target practice. But not comparable to blowout panel which doesn't need action from the crew.
 
Blow out panels are probably very hard to design and make note they did not come into use in tanks until very late cold war (similar date to computer design stuff and car crumple zones that worked well ?)

You probably need very exact design (from complicated flow modelling of pressures involved) combined with very precise manufacturing to make it work.

That and the pressures involved are probably orders of magnitude different.
ie,
- tank 8kg (ish?) of propellant per round and 40 (ish) rounds in tank. (ignore that they are not all in same place with the same blow out panel) that's only 320kg of propellant total.
- BB (using Hood) 196 kg per round, 120 rounds per gun so 23520 KG per gun or 47,040 kg per magazine (twin mount, assuming best case and adjacent mount doesn't detonate as well)

So "only" 147 time bigger and I'm sure you will get even worse squared and cubed effects on the pressure and energy ?

Not that it would be imposable with modern tech look at VLS designs ?
 

CalBear

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Warships use an entirely different protection design. Each bulkhead reduces the bast effect, reducing casualties and weapon effect. That is why AP shells are designed to penetrate and feature delayed fusing to place the maximum detonation effect as deep inside the vessel as possible. Magazine designs fight this by burying the magazine deeply inside the ship, generally at or below the waterline with additional protection surround the compartments. A blow out panel on a warship would need to vent up half a dozen decks or more and would provide a direct path to the magazine for plunging fire.

A tank only has one compartment (two for the M1A1 and other newer design where the driver is isolated in his own capsule), the blowout panel directs the magazine explosion energy away from the single compartment.
 
Zumwalt

The latest navy design has a version of this...

The DDG-1000 destroyers have 20 4 cell PVLS (Peripheral Vertical Launch System) arranged around the perimeter of the deck. Not only does that put the potential hazards on the edges of the ship (rather than the center), each cell is designed to blow out away from the ship and away from adjacent cells if compromised.

Not exactly the same, but a similar concept. Would only work with missiles I think, couldn't really circle the perimeter of a BB with propellant and shells...
 
I think tank blowout panels are a direct result of stowing ammo in the turret bustle. In older tanks without the big bustle the ammo was stowed n the hull and these didn't have blowout panels, the same way a BB stows its ammo deep in the hull.
 
Tanks and battleships use different solutions because of the different scale. There is no place on a tank where the ammunition would not be within 4-5 feet of the outside. On a battleship, the ammunition is usually 30-40+ feet inside from the hull surface. This makes armoring in depth practical and blow out panels impractical.

The other problem is that the magazines are located under the turrets they serve. The explosion has to be vented above the waterline because water is not compressable and will not allow the venting of the explosion. This means that any blow out panels are also an access tunnel for incoming fire, as the plunging shells can strike the panels for a direct route into the magazines.

This does not apply to tanks, because opposing tanks use flat trajectory fire to strike the side and/or front armor, not the top armor where a blow out panel would be accessable.
 
Not sure they are imposable just to hard with BB golden age (1905-1945) technology.

HMS Lion's turret acted as a quasi blow out panel at Jutland.

The roof was blown off by the explosion but that potentially vented sufficient pressure that it didn't detonate the magazine (that had already been flooded & the bottom door was probably not sufficiently flash tight to have saved it had it not been flooded)

I think this shows that with modern technology you could design blow outs that would minimise damage/casualties on a battleship, just that it would be very hard to calculate without computers and would probably still kill anybody in the mount but saving the ship would be worth it. (not that you would use robots nowadays anyway to save crew)
 
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