PC/WI: Chobham/Reactive armour used amidships on warships as an anti-ASM defence

WILDGEESE

Gone Fishin'
To be honest I don't know about the weight and anti corrosive properties of Chobham or Reactive armour so here goes.

What if Chobham or Reactive armour was fitted to warships as an anti ASM defence?

What I'm thinking of is not the entire beam but instead an area around 20 feet either side of amidships to counter beam riding ship killing missiles.

Also to stop corrosion due to salt water, put the armour on the inside of the hull behind the steel as a secondary defence

Would this work?

How practical would this be/

Regards filers
 
I'm not sure what mass of reactive armor you would need to use against anti-ship missiles but I'm guessing it will have to be tremendous.

I can say, though, that in general the evolution of ships beginning in World War II stemmed from the realization that anti-ship weapons were growing so powerful it was probably better not to get hit in the first place, and if that's your goal, weighing down a ship with armor is not helpful. You could use that tonnage instead for more sophisticated countermeasures.
 
Basically all you get by using chobram is an uneccessarily expensive and slightly less hydodynamic hull. ERA basically makes the hull more dangerous, and potentially acts as a mine, depending on where and how powerful it is.

ASMs use either HE or nukes. Chobram and ERA are designed to defeat shaped charges and KEPs.

And as for putting it behind steel, it already is. It's basically a sheet of hard ceramic sandwiched between steel. The ceramic shatters and disperses the jet penatrator of a HEAT warhead an deforms and defects KEPs. A big HE warhead's still going to put a hole in it. Hit a tank using Chobram with 1000 lbs of HE, and it's going to hole the hull too.
 

Philip

Donor
Also to stop corrosion due to salt water, put the armour on the inside of the hull behind the steel as a secondary defence

You want to put enough high explosive to counter a 500kg warhead inside your hull? What do you think will happen when that detonates?
 
You want to put enough high explosive to counter a 500kg warhead inside your hull? What do you think will happen when that detonates?
Obviously we will also need 18 inches of steel armor or so behind that, and so on and so forth.
 
I think the extra weight of said armour would be better spent on ECM and Weapon systems designed to shoot down modern ASM and a hull / superstructure design built to be as stealthy as possible

Ohh!? Never mind. Looks like the worlds navy's are already several decades ahead of me LOL

No seriously armour on a ship beyond reinforced kevlar protected areas (protection vs splinters etc for the CIC) was shown to be obsolete by 1943 at the very latest.
 
Battleships were not obsoleted becasue thier armour was too weak to stand up to threats. In fact the armoured belts on the last generation of fast battleships such as the Iowa, Yamato, and KGV were essentially impervious to the fire of thier peers at combat ranges.
The problem was that to mount this kind of protection, the weight of armour required was crippling, and to fully armour the entire warship would be impossible. Instead the armour was concentrated into the vectors most likely to receive fire With everywhere else having minimal or not protection. Against battleships this worked fairly well, as incoming shells had to come in mostly along the horizontal plane where the heavy thicknesses of belt armour could shatter them. Shells striking the deck would typically be coming in at such an angle that much lighter armour would cause them to bounce.

Viable attack aircraft changed everything. Now the thin deck armour could be struck directly and penetrated with ease, and torpedoes could be delivered past any escort force to deliver devestating strikes from below. There was simply no way to sufficiently armour agaisnt ever vector of attack. Which is why every naval power just stopped putting armour on thier ships thwere was no way to mount enough to be effective. Instead the survivability or a ship would now rely on proactive defence perimeters andnot being detected.


It is true that modern armour compounds have dramatically increased the protection available for thier weight. But modern weapons have also dramatically increased in potency, so much so that modern MBTs have essentially embraced the same kind of all or nothing armour scheme that the battleships once did. To keep weight down only the frontal arc can be protected agasint the most potent of armour piercing weapons. It would still be impossible to armour completely an entire ship with modern armour composites to sufficiently proof them against even the lighter anti-shipping missiles such as Exocet or Harpoon. To do so agaisnt the behemoth supersonic weapons like Brahmos or Granit is definately beyond any capability.

You could as the old battleships did make an armoured belt of such composites which might with signficant weight expenditutre be able to defened agasint the lighter weapons. The problem is that your geopolitcal opponents will then simply alter the attack profiles on thier weapons to avoid these vectors. Either sea skimming, then popping up to slam into the unarmoured deck, or diving down from high altitude.
Of course these profiles give a bit of extra chance for your active defences to engage and neutralize them, but the displacement taken up by armour required to achieve this would be much better spent on more and better active protection systems.


The maxim that is true across pretty much all of modern warfare is that if you get hit you are dead. The solution is thus; Don't get hit, Dont be fired upon, and Don't be detected.
 
Regarding a battleship being hit: this is one of the heavy Russian ASMs of the 1970s. When this thing impacts at Mach 2,5, even with conventional warhead, there is no armor belt that is going to save the ship.
And up to the disarmament treaties, some of those carried a 450 kT nuclear warhead.
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What about the Dynamic Armour proposed for the new USB carriers? Design specifically to defeat a heat warhead as I understand it.
 

SsgtC

Banned
What about the Dynamic Armour proposed for the new USB carriers? Design specifically to defeat a heat warhead as I understand it.
HEAT isn't really an issue with antisurface missiles. It doesn't give you the damage you need. HEAT works against tanks with their realativly small internal volume. It doesn't take much to completely torch them. It's very different for a ship, with it's vastly larger internal volume, multiple subdivisions and enormous fire fighting capabilities. You really need something with a bigger bang.
 
What about the Dynamic Armour proposed for the new USB carriers? Design specifically to defeat a heat warhead as I understand it.
I'm not an expert on this new type of armor and I'm actually a little bit unclear on what the purpose of it is on the new carriers. It's also a different question than the original post in this thread. Bearing all that in mind, perhaps we need to revisit some basic principles of military ship design that were discussed in another thread recently on the topic of bringing back old battleship-style armor to ships:

1. In the modern age, dating back to World War II, the cost of armoring a ship is out of all proportion to the cost of penetrating that armor.... This is why battleships became obsolete but the same grim physics applies to any ship. Any sea power with tactical nuclear weapons can, by definition, sink any size of existing ship regardless of its armor. Going down a level, any major sea power can either use its existing conventional weapons to knock a ship out of fighting capacity (a "mission kill"), or it could develop weapons capable of doing that for a fraction of the cost of your fancy new armored ships. Offensive power has simply increased to the point where taking a hit is no longer a safe proposition.

2. ... and that's okay. We used to armor up battleships because they could only fight at short range and their range was inevitably going to be about the same range as the enemy's battleships. The situation is no longer that clearcut. An old-fashioned armoured warship, even the best late classes like the Iowa ships, would be mission killed by a modern warship using missiles long before it got into range to use its big guns.

3. So, it's better not to be hit in the first place. Modern ships, including carriers, do have some armor over the most critical spaces. Usually this is Kevlar, I believe. Perhaps the call is to replace the Kevlar with electric armor; I do not know how advanced such plans are. However, they won't change the fundamental fact, which is that warships' primary defensive measure nowadays is to avoid getting hit in the first place. To that end, weighing down a ship with lots of armor slows it down, which makes it more vulnerable, and is therefore generally seen as a bad thing. The most important defenses any aircraft carrier have are its speed, its onboard aircraft, its escort ships, and some form of close-in weapons system like Phalanx for last-ditch attempts to shoot down an approaching enemy missile in flight.

All of this said, again, perhaps there is a very good military case for revolutionary new types of armor. However, those types of armor will serve in the same role as the Kevlar and other types do now, to hopefully reduce the chances that splinters, shrapnel, etc. cause catastrophic damage.
 
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