Battleship of the XXI century
Despite many problems and limitations, it is possible to install armor on modern ships. As already mentioned, there is a weight "underload" (in the complete absence of free volumes), which can be used to enhance passive protection.
First you need to decide what exactly needs to be protected with armor. During the Second World War, the booking scheme pursued a very specific goal - to maintain the buoyancy of the ship when it was hit by shells. Therefore, the hull area was reserved in the waterline area (just above and below the overhead line level). In addition, it is necessary to prevent detonation of ammunition, loss of the ability to move, fire and control it. Therefore, the main battery guns, their cellars in the hull, power plant and control posts were carefully armored. These are the critical zones that ensure the combat effectiveness of the ship, i.e. ability to fight: shoot aimingly, move and not sink.
In the case of a modern ship, everything is much more complicated. Application of the same criteria for assessing combat effectiveness leads to inflating volumes that are assessed as critical.
To conduct targeted firing, the WWII ship had enough to keep the gun itself and its ammunition magazine intact - it could conduct aimed fire even when the command post was broken, the ship was immobilized, and the centralized fire control command post was shot down. Modern weapons are less autonomous. They need target designation (either external or their own), power supply and communication. This requires the ship to preserve its electronics and energy in order to be able to fight. Cannons can be loaded and aimed manually, but missiles require electricity and radar to fire. This means that it is necessary to book the equipment rooms of the radar and power plant in the building, as well as cable routes. And such devices as communication antennas and radar canvases cannot be booked at all.
In this situation, even if the volume of the SAM cellar is booked, but the enemy anti-ship missiles will fall into the unarmored part of the hull, where, unfortunately, the communications equipment or the central control radar station, or power generators will be located, the ship's air defense fails completely. This picture is quite consistent with the criteria for assessing the reliability of technical systems by its weakest element. The unreliability of a system determines its worst component. An artillery ship has only two such components - guns with ammunition and a power plant. And both of these elements are compact and easily protected by armor. A modern ship has many such components: radars, power plants, cable routes, missile launchers, etc. And the failure of any of these components leads to the collapse of the entire system.
You can try to assess the stability of certain combat systems of the ship, using the method of assessing the reliability (see footnote at the end of the article) … For example, take the long-range air defense of artillery ships of the WWII era and modern destroyers and cruisers. By reliability we mean the ability of the system to continue working in the event of a failure (defeat) of its components. The main difficulty here will be determining the reliability of each of the components. To somehow solve this problem, we will accept two methods of such a calculation. The first is equal reliability of all components (let it be 0, 8). Second, the reliability is proportional to their area reduced to the total lateral projection area of the ship.
As you can see, both taking into account the relative area in the lateral projection of the ship, and under equal conditions, the reliability of the system decreases for all modern ships. No wonder. To disable the long-range air defense of the Cleveland cruiser, you must either destroy all 6 127-mm AUs, or 2 KDPs, or the power industry (supplying electricity to the KDP and AU drives). The destruction of one control room or several AU does not lead to a complete system failure. For a modern RRC of the "Slava" type, for a complete failure of the system, it is necessary to hit either the volumetric S-300F launcher with missiles, or the illumination-guidance radar, or destroy the power plant. The destroyer "Arlie Burke" has higher reliability, primarily due to the separation of ammunition in two independent UVPUs and a similar separation of the illumination-guidance radar.
This is a very rough analysis of just one ship's weapon system, with many assumptions. Moreover, armored ships are given a serious head start. For example, all the components of the reduced system of a WWII-era ship are armored, and modern ships' antennas are not protected in principle (the probability of their destruction is higher). The role of electricity in the combat capability of WWII ships is incomparably less, because even when the power supply is disconnected, it is possible to continue the fire with manual supply of shells and rough guidance by means of optics, without centralized control from the control room. Artillery ship ammunition cellars are below the waterline, modern missile cellars are located just below the upper deck of the hull. Etc.
In fact, the very concept of "battleship" has acquired a completely different meaning than during the Second World War. If earlier a warship was a platform for a multitude of relatively independent (self-contained) weapon components, then a modern ship is a well-coordinated combat organism with a single nervous system. The destruction of a part of the ship during the Second World War was of a local nature - where there was damage, there was a failure. Everything else that did not fall into the affected area can work and fight on. If a pair of ants dies in an anthill, this is a trifle of life for an anthill. In a modern ship, a hit in the stern will almost inevitably affect what is done on the bow. This is no longer an anthill, this is a human body that, having lost an arm or a leg, will not die, but will no longer be able to fight. These are the objective consequences of improving weapons. It may seem that this is not development, but degradation. However, the armored ancestors could only fire cannons within sight. And modern ships are versatile and capable of destroying targets hundreds of kilometers away. Such a qualitative leap is accompanied by certain losses, including an increase in the complexity of weapons and, as a consequence, a decrease in reliability, an increase in vulnerability and an increased sensitivity to failures.
Therefore, the role of booking in a modern ship is obviously lower than that of their artillery ancestors. If the reservation is to be revived, then with slightly different purposes - to prevent the immediate death of the ship in case of a direct hit in the most explosive systems, such as ammunition and launchers. Such a reservation only slightly improves the ship's combat capability, but can significantly increase its survivability. This is a chance not to fly up into the air instantly, but to try to organize a fight to save the ship. Finally, it is simply the time that the crew can be evacuated.
The very concept of a ship's "combat capability" has also changed dramatically. Modern combat is so fleeting and impetuous that even a short-term ship breakdown can affect the outcome of the battle. If in the battles of the artillery era, inflicting significant injuries on the enemy could take hours, today it can take seconds. If in the years of the Second World War the ship's exit from the battle was practically equal to its sending to the bottom, then today the elimination of the ship from active combat can be just turning off its radar. Or, if the battle with the external control center - the interception of the AWACS aircraft (helicopter).
Nevertheless, let's try to estimate what kind of booking a modern warship could have.
Lyrical digression about target designation
Assessing the reliability of the systems, I would like to move away for a while from the topic of booking and touch on the accompanying issue of target designation for missile weapons. As shown above, one of the weakest points of a modern ship is its radar and other antennas, the constructive protection of which is completely impossible. In this regard, and also taking into account the successful development of active homing systems, it is sometimes proposed to completely abandon their own general detection radars with the transition to obtaining preliminary data on targets from external sources. For example, from a shipborne AWACS helicopter or drones.
SAM or anti-ship missiles with an active seeker do not need continuous target illumination and they only need approximate data on the area and direction of movement of the destroyed objects. This makes it quite possible to switch to an external control center.
The reliability of an external control center as a component of a system (for example, a system of the same air defense system) is very difficult to assess. The vulnerability of the sources of the external control center is very high - the helicopters are shot down by the enemy's long-range air defense systems, they are counteracted by means of electronic warfare. In addition, UAVs, helicopters and other sources of target data are dependent on the weather, they require high-speed and stable communication with the recipient of the information. However, the author is unable to accurately determine the reliability of such systems. We will conventionally take such reliability as "not worse" than that of other elements of the system. How the reliability of such a system will change with the abandonment of its own control center, we will show on the example of the air defense of the "Arleigh Burke" EM.
As you can see, the rejection of illumination-guidance radars increases the reliability of the system. However, the exclusion of its own means of target detection from the system slows down the growth of the system's reliability. Without the SPY-1 radar, the reliability increased by only 4%, while the duplication of the external control center and the control center radar increases the reliability by 25%. This suggests that a complete rejection of their own radar is impossible.
In addition, some of the radar facilities of modern ships have a number of unique characteristics, which are completely undesirable to lose. Russia has unique radio-technical systems for active and passive target designation for anti-ship missiles, with over-the-horizon detection range of enemy ships. These are RLC "Titanit" and "Monolith". The detection range of a surface ship reaches 200 kilometers or more, despite the fact that the antennas of the complex are placed not even on the tops of the masts, but on the roofs of the wheelhouses. To refuse them is simply a crime, because the enemy does not have such means. With such a radar, a ship or a coastal missile system is completely autonomous and does not depend on any external sources of information.
Possible booking schemes
Let's try to equip the relatively modern missile cruiser Slava with armor. To do this, let's compare it with ships of similar dimensions.
The table shows that RRC "Slava" can be loaded with an additional 1,700 tons of load, which will be about 15, 5% of the resulting displacement of 11,000 tons. It is fully consistent with the parameters of the cruisers of the period of the Second World War. And TARKR "Peter the Great" can withstand the strengthening of armor from 4500 tons of load, which will be 15, 9% of the standard displacement.
Let's consider the possible booking schemes.
Having booked only the most fire and explosive zones of the ship and its power plant, the thickness of the armor protection was reduced by almost 2 times in comparison with the Cleveland LKR, the booking of which during the Second World War was also considered not the most powerful and successful. And this despite the fact that the most explosive places of the artillery ship (the cellar of shells and charges) are located below the waterline and generally have little risk of damage. In rocket ships, volumes containing tons of gunpowder are located just below deck and high above the waterline.
Another scheme is possible with protection of only the most dangerous zones with a priority of thickness. In this case, you will have to forget about the main belt and the power plant. We concentrate all the armor around the S-300F cellars, anti-ship missiles, 130-mm shells and GKP. In this case, the thickness of the armor grows to 100 mm, but the area of the zones covered by the armor in the area of the ship's lateral projection drops to a ridiculous 12.6%. The RCC must be very unlucky to get it to these places.
In both booking options, the Ak-630 gun mounts and their cellars, power plants with generators, helicopter ammunition and fuel storage, steering gears, all radio electronics hardware and cable routes remain completely defenseless. All this was simply absent on the Cleveland, so the designers did not even think about their protection. Getting into any unarmored area for Cleveland did not promise fatal consequences. The rupture of a couple of kilograms of explosives of an armor-piercing (or even high-explosive) projectile outside the critical zones could not threaten the ship as a whole. "Cleveland" could endure more than a dozen such hits during a long, many hours of battle.
It's different with modern ships. An anti-ship missile containing tens and even hundreds of times more explosives, once in unarmored volumes, will cause such severe injuries that the ship almost immediately loses its combat effectiveness, even if the critical armored zones remained intact. Just one hit of an OTN anti-ship missile with a warhead weighing 250-300 kg leads to the complete destruction of the ship's interior within a radius of 10-15 meters from the place of detonation. This is more than the width of the body. And, most importantly, the armored ships of the Second World War era in these unprotected zones did not have systems that directly affect the ability to conduct combat. A modern cruiser has control rooms, power plants, cable routes, radio electronics, and communications. And all this is not covered with armor! If we try to stretch the booking area and their volumes, then the thickness of such protection will drop to a completely ridiculous 20-30 mm.
Nevertheless, the proposed scheme is quite viable. The armor protects the most dangerous areas of the ship from shrapnel and fires, close explosions. But will a 100-mm steel barrier protect against a direct hit and penetration by a modern anti-ship missile of the corresponding class (OTN or TN)?
The end follows …
(*) More information about calculating the reliability can be found here:
