What's A Ship's Armored Citadel? 

I can‘t believe I just watched Ryan draw a battleship on a white board for 10 minutes. No regrets

"If we raise enough money maybe I'll be able to go to art school." Well done! A 2nd thumbs up for that gem if I could.

We need a follow-up video where Libby sits down with Ryan's Mom in her kitchen and she shows us all of Ryan's childhood battleship drawings she hung on the refrigerator. 🤣🤣

Perfect rendition. I thought I was looking at a real Iowa class battleship rather than a drawing!

The South Dakota demonstrated the effective of all or nothing protection. Although she took a beating at the second night battle of Guadalcanal her citidel was never penetrated and the ship was never in danger of sinking.

The citadel: the safest place ever to exist at sea. Side effect: also one of the coolest.

The design of battleships like New Jersey took months and years. But today, Ryan can design one in ten minutes. Things really improved after the invention of the whiteboard.

Ryan and Libby thank you for the bloopers!! Happy 4th BB-62 crew!!!

pennsylvania got its bow taken off at the end of ww2 but still stayed afloat so at least some of the theory about the citidel being bouyant enough to float the ship was tested

Happy Independance Day to Ryan & all the Captain's & Crew's who have served on the Battleship New Jersey. And also, to all of the wonderful Volunteers who have helped and are helping restore her!

I love the art school comment at the end.

We don't know how NJ's armor would hold up, but we know how South Dakota's did. Turns out, pretty well, but you can still make a ship combat ineffective without ever penetrating the armor.

Happy Independence Day battleship New Jersey! 🇺🇸

I always thought they were fully armored but now that its been explained I couldn't imagine it being any different

It's interesting to see the armoured protection on these ships which you simply don't see on modern warships which rely on detection and countermeasures for the most part . The weight and performance of the great battleships would surely be cost prohibitive nowadays .

I was a little dubious about the diagram at first, but Ryan really makes it come together! Well, he has made enough of those brick model kits.

Yay, blooper reel!

The conning tower was a waste of treaty tonnage, top weight, and armor steel, nobody ever used it. On the ships that did get into gunfights, all the officers were out on the unarmored bridge where they could see what was happening instead of being in the little tube with walls a foot and a half thick.

I've been following you for some time now and I am just fascinated by the incredible engendering that goes into the ship, and the enormous size! Now I have to visit very soon!

If I remember correctly, the British County class heavy cruisers used an armoured citadel-type protection before they were refitted to be armoured the way the British had intended from the start but couldn't due to the treaty In all likelihood, this was something planned for the intended 15.5-18,000 ton 8 9.2-inch gun County cruisers before they got killed by the treaty.

Very high tech video. Thanks. I note from the thumbnail that the armour was exactly one wiki-wiki thick. Imagine being the marine architect who had to balance all of that weight in the design phase.

I believe the engineers that designed the systems in the battleship as well as the armor knew what they were doing. I would never presume to second guess them. Engineering is always an exercise in dealing with constraints, compromises to get the best results from what they had to work with. Also the more experience that the navy gained from being in battle was also added to the data that the engineers drew from.

It's the place where the Captain yells at the enemy "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

Need to make that technical drawing a post card for the gift shop. Maybe a poster.

This video is great, perfectly explain the process of how a battleship is design and works.

Now that’s what I call fine art.. 🍻

Since you're re-doing older videos, could you perhaps make a video on the ship's superstructure detailing the purpose of each section/tower?

hello from Croatia from battleship and naval warfare fan, keep up the good work. greetings!

It's the same argument of up armored humves vs on armor. I hear the troops preferred the normal humvee because they were more maneuverable . and it impossible to armor against everything.

The nice thing about being able to extend the armoured box from the citadel to the steering gears is that in terms of weight, is that you no longer need the armour plate on the originally designed front of the steering gear and originally conceived back of the citadel. What cost of weight would have gone there for those armour plates, can instead be spent on the weight of armour required to extend the citadel box. Besides of course, the other nicety you mentioned for buoyancy.

Thanks Ryan and enjoy the July 4th fireworks tonight and just imagine you are in a WWII surface engagement aiming the 16 in guns!!!!

Ah! So there’s an idea. I know you’ve talked about this before - but just WHAT were those “compromises” in design? Another drawing episode might be in order.😄 I really would like to get into the weeds on this topic. What are some compromises discussed in the various books the Naval Institute Press has published? Love, love, love anything regarding the design and construction of these “peak Navy” vessels❣️ Thanks Ryan & Libby🤗

you are so passionate Its a good thing the armor was never tested means nobody died as a result. best weapon is one that sits unused and un needed

Great video, as always! I really liked the outakes at the end too.

Designing these ships is and was a pretty basic series of trade-offs that then have to be implemented by folks with an insane degree of engineering and physics knowledge. The Iowas were specifically designed with TWO primary goals in mind: (1) we wanted FAST battleships and (2) we wanted ships that could range vast chunks of the Pacific (we were specifically designing the Iowas, prewar, to be our battleships for the PACIFIC - we were planning to use completely different battleships in the Atlantic because the nature of that arena dictated very different design priorities). So, we wanted speed and fuel-economy. These are both accomplished by reducing weight, thereby reducing displacement, thereby reducing draft, thereby reducing friction of the ship vs water. Also, we improved both by upgrades to the power-plant as well as some minor improvements to hull-design. You have to factor in all sorts of other things - like you need your various centers of mass and centers of buoyancy to be arranged in a fairly defined range and you have to make considerations for stability and maneuverability - you don't want a battleship that is going to cap-size if it takes a list of 11 degrees or can't turn without sending dishes flying worse than a submarine. But we really started adding armor and weight to the Iowas as we studied what the Japanese were building and putting to sea. The idea of the Iowas was - even if your ships' guns out-range us by a little bit - it's not a big deal if we are just faster than you. We can just stay out of range and wait for the carriers to arrive. And once we started seeing that Japan was dumping everything at building big behemoths, and once we got some pretty good intelligence on their performance capabilities - the Navy felt more comfortable adding more weight - armor, guns, ammo, men, whatever - to these ships. After all - we didn't need our ships to be 10 knots faster than the Japanese, as long as we could make 2-3 knots better than their best speed and if we could steam harder for longer - we knew we'd be able to use radar and air-recon to keep our big boys out of range of the IJN - and that's all that mattered. The Japanese had this dream of a decisive naval battle that would send our Pacific fleet to the bottom. Little did they know: we really just liked to sail our battleships North and South about 600 miles East of the main Islands just because we knew it forced the Imperial Navy to shadow us. And so we just sailed our battleships North and South and North and South knowing full-well: hey, we have identified Japan's most finite resource, we'd already sunk all their tankers and bombed their refinery and pumping facilities: we just had to run them out of the last of the gas they still had - which we ultimately did. By the final surrender - Japan couldn't have sortied more than a few capital ships for longer than a few days, even if we had let them.

We need a bloopers reel.

Thanks for the chuckle about Art School. I didn't think it was that bad...but the comment was funny! Love the commentary!

Keep in mind the strategic differences between Iowa and the IJN battleships she was designed to oppose. Japan designed big bad mothas that had bigger guns, that could blast you harder, from farther and can withstand anything your fledgling little 16"ers are gonna do at or beyond their maximum effective range. The Japanese designed and planned (and then promptly forgot about) their Battleships with the idea that they would stay in fairly close range to the home islands as protection and deterrence and could also be used to tremendous effect against shore facilities in China, Korea, Russia or ANYWHERE else that Imperial Japan and the Nazis might develop hostile reactions. We conversely, recognized that, if we ever HAD TO go and fight Japan - we'd have to GO A REALLY FAR DISTANCE across a REALLY BIG really unforgiving ocean with very few little coral outcroppings to maybe consider laying anchor at if you want to make resupply or maintenance easier. We designed our boats for SPEED and CRUISE ECONOMY. And it showed in the war. The Japanese assumed we wanted to use our battleships as they did theirs. But, we never had that plan or philosophy EVER, AT ALL.

Thanks for this video, short but full of useful information.

So when you put armoured citadel into Google, the 4th image is of Ryan from a video on this from November 4th 2020 To be honest, I could see this channel doing a series of What if New Jersey was in the place of a ship at a battle in WW2 and WW1 and would her being there change it like f.e USS New Jersey is in the place of the HMS Prince of Wales at Denmark Strait or if she was at the battle where battlecruiser Kirishima was sunk being the one sinking Kirishima

TY Ryan. Very informative. Now I know!

Given the overall design of the Iowa-class, I'd say their armor protection is quite balanced out. Offensive and defensive capabilities, coupled together with their impressive speed make them among one of the best built battleship classes in the world. I can't see them up armored or armored less. If you want to up armor, just build the Montana-class with a conventional armor arrangement (as the Navy was planning on doing during the design phase of the Montana-class). You give them little armor, then congratulations, because you just built an American version of a British battlecruiser.

According to Robert Summerall's "Iowa Class Battleships", the main deck over the citadel is known as the bomb deck and is 1.5 in of STS plate. The splinter deck is below the armor deck and is a 0.625 STS plate. The splinter deck is not the deck over the armored deck. The splinter deck also provides the emergency escape route off of "broadway" in the engineering spaces.

If all the unarmored spaces of the ship are flooded, the ship may remain afloat and mobile and capable of firing its main guns, but it will hardly be combat effective! It will be very slow, quite probably be wallowing in the water, and with that much damage, its fire control is likely damaged as well! Still, remaining afloat, mobile, and capable of firing its guns, it will have a chance to get somewhere where repairs can be made, and of course, the majority of the crew will survive!

great video, really interesting

The structural stability is significantly improved by six double transverse bulkheads and three box girders running in the longitudinal direction of the ship. The box girders extend at upper deck level from the VLS to the helipad on the port and starboard side of the ship and in the middle of the hull to cover 80% of the ship's length. The cross-section of the rectangular outer box girders is 1.2 m × 1.2 m, the cross-section of the middle 1.5 m × 0.6 m.[4] These additional stiffeners and cofferdams ensure that the gas hammer and the fragmentation cloud can only expand to a limited extent in the ship after a shell or missile impact and that the longitudinal strength is maintained. This largely prevents the hull from breaking apart.[13] The ship is divided into twelve large watertight compartments and four damage control areas, each of which has its own command area for internal combat. For the bow of the New Jersey, a possibility of structural damage after a HE shell or torpedo hit is determined. Source: Brandenburg class (1994)

A real work of art :D

While the all-or-nothing scheme did prevent battle kills, it made it quite easy to achieve a mission kill. For example by puncturing the fuel tanks. Like how Bismarck was forced to return to France after having received a small amount of damage in the encounter with Hood.

A battleship is a weapon. Her 2 main functions are: a) Arrive at destination b) Fire from destination. Your main concern is ensure that all the system necessary for that are protected. Yes you can protect everything and take 2 years to go from Puget Sound to Hawaii, or protect nothing and have the ship crumple like a tin can in a sea state 4. I think the engineers did a marvelous job at balancing having 9 16" guns on a ship that was protected enough to sail at 30+kts if needed.

I have always found the battle bridge on these big ships fascinating. Just a big cylinder that's 12 or so inches thick which in some cases have little more than several little slits to see out from. Just trying to imagine what it must be like to be sealed up in there and get your bell rung when a shell manages to find its way to that. It is a tough nut to crack, no doubt, and you're probably reasonably safe from most things. But what it must be like in that tiny space when a 10+ inch shell hits it square on, or even just a glancing blow, must be absolute h**l for the men in there. Anyway, I do hope to be able to visit some day. And thanks to you and everybody else working to keep her alive. I'm sure it is an immense amount of work requiring a similarly sized immense pile of money. There's no limit to how much I appreciate what you all do to keep these beauties alive and available to everyone. Hope everyone has a fantastic Independence day!

HMS Warrior was the first ship to have an armoured Citedel with all or nothing armour...

I feel like battleships and cruisers that went down either took enough of a pummeling that all that armor was for naught, or they took hits outside the armored citadel, but that damage was enough to make the ship mission ineffective or even vulnerable to more lethal damage.

Let's see Cod match this brilliant artistry! 😁

Drach is gonna do a whiteboard now lol

Great ship !

When you think about the time it was designed.... pre missiles.... the armour was in the right places. Although it could have probably done with a little bit of light armour in other places to stop the little peashooters they had on airplanes.

I got to peek into the citadel of the Missouri and damn that armor was thick.

Interesting , Thank You .

Very good video

Nice one Mate 🇦🇺👍

It's interesting to me to think that the only thing that did in the USS Arizona was one or two well placed shots into the powder magazine.

So fun!

I like the outtakes. 😂

The content is very good

So, based on complaints about Iowa-class vessel simulation, what World of Warships doesn't take into affect is fuse triggering; non-exploding shell punch-thru's versus explosions/armor piercing. Non-cidatel damage can still sink ships in-game, or so I gather.

Its always a compromise with armor, its just to heavy to be all inclusive and its weight will slow the ship down. It also negatively affecting maneuverability and fuel consumption. Only armor what is most important to continue fighting the type of battel you plan to fight. The lighter built areas are much easier and quicker to repair. Better bomb and torpedo protection would have been nice though.

At 9:05 - Remember air INTAKES too. If you can't get air into the fire-rooms to feed all that bunker fuel or whatever nastiness those boys drink - doesn't matter if you've got armored stacks - the only real reason the stacks are up-armored is to provide extra protection from a high-altitude ariel bomb from penetrating to the vitals if you get a 1000 lb'er straight down the stack. I promise you - even if the stack gets blown away - all that steam and exhaust is finding its way up and out of whatever crater remains. The same is not true for that airflow INTO the giant naturally aspirated furnace that powers the whole shabang.

You’re funny Ryan .. excellent video on armor

I just realized that these Iowas would be VERY resistant against the naval drones everyone's worrying about these days! If they ever WERE brought back into service, they can tank hits better than anything else afloat!

Would it be worth a video to speculate on what a battleship made with modern materials and technology would be? I don't mean a "well, battleships are obsolete so you just mean a carrier" video, but like what sort of armor could we forge now, do we know more about the optimal hull shape, would a nuclear reactor give it enough power to make heavier armor feasible while maintaining speed? Maybe there is too much to consider at once. What about making this armor with current tech?

Deck armor is key, ref HMS Hood…. Also secondary Dec armor to withstand AP shells that fuse/detonate in the j terror spaces

To your ending question, many US battleships were still floating at the end of the war, the US's enemies battleships were not.

Wisconsin took hits from a North Korean field artillery battery--and retaliated by turning the mountain into a mole hill. Iowa suffered a detonation in one of its main turrets--and survived. I'd say that the battleship armor passed a couple of tests.

Ryan, so glad you are a curator. Your pen and ink skills, while being VASTLY better than mine... Oh, completely different question. Is the bow so long and fine, to improve top speed? Since there is very little room, in front of the forward barbette. steve

Nice

By Peral Harbor and the German U-boat should have told the designer the weight of the belt should have been used on the deck and torpedo line. With torpedoes from subs or planes or deck plunging bombs from planes as the biggest threat.

At the time the system made since as they were intended to face other Battleships, but for any new Battleship, a more distributed system against HE missile warheads and 8"/203mm artillery would be more useful in protecting the ship from the likely threats as there would be no existing heavy caliber guns to protect against.

We definitely need to get you an art scholarship.

very good

I have a video topic that could be brought up in the future: What is the difference between a Fire Director and a Rangefinder? Also, what may be the variables required to figure out a fire control solution?

I think this armor plan is excellent and the compromises make sense.

Art school 😂😂 you did fine, Ryan.

the ships liquor cabinet needs armor!

9:20: that's definitely an Iowa class BB. Unmistakable. How about another video on the torpedo protection?

While battleship guns were the biggest weapon on the seas, the all-or-nothing scheme makes a lot of sense. However, when 10-ton armour-piercing bombs dropped from heavy bombers had become the biggest weapon, the bigger they are, the easier to hit. As Tirpitz can testify. In the current day and age, a large number of small platforms makes much more sense.

I wanna see you do a video on the Montana class, from what i have heard about them, even the the bathroom mirrors were rated to stop 3 inch shells LOL

Do you think that the armor protection would’ve stopped or protected the ship from a 18 inch shell from the Yamato or a Bismarck 15 inch shell or how would the New Jersey armor protect would have held up.

The only add on I would do is make the mess and medical fragment proof

The armor was never tested. But it was discovered that a friendly 5" shell can knock a hole into the library and injure an unlucky sailor who was using the head.

Isn't it also belief, that HMS Hood was hit right under the armored belt, under the water line.

Bismarck had extra armor all over the place including in the bow and stern and also a turtle-back deck...part of the reason she was so big compared to other European battleships like KGV

Happy 4th of JULY

Does it do you any good to have your steering mechanism perfectly intact inside its armored box at the bottom of the ocean because the unarmored area in front of it got hit and blew off the stern? There might not be anything important inside of it but that area still seems kind of necessary just to connect A to B.

finally i know how to build a battleship!!!

I'd love to see the armor in a video. at least where we could see it.

I find the "armored citadel" approach interesting. I'm assuming that the armor doesn't cover sleeping areas...If ship took combat damage that required the crew to remain in the citadel I'm assuming the crew is sleeping on the floor in the upper deck.

Question I thought of after dry docking was completed. Before invention of modern high pressure water jets, how did they remove fouling and old paint, say around World War I?

Built primarily to protect from large caliber armor piercing shells, and torpedoes, with less emphasis on threats posed by bomber and kamikaze attacks. Superior Japanese and German torpedoes were probably the greatest danger to these ships.

I personally think less places should be armored, especially the conning tower, as the experience of Prince of Wales during the battle of the Atlantic showed, maybe the equipment needs to be rebuilt (effectively putting her out of fight for the hunt that began soon after), but the humans inside are safe with their skill, machine can be replaced, people can't. And as a side note, there have been damage to destroyers (who were effectively, without armor) by US 16" shells, the ship was perfectly fine afterward, just need some patching on the hull

Happy 4th!