Thick Battleship Armor - How was it constructed ?
Musicman59
attached to the ship? Sure would like to know the engineering of how
something so huge is assembled.
Is it applied in layers?
Thx much - Craig
Eugene Griessel
It is a more complex question than you may imagine as it differed from
class to class, and with time as side armour gave way to "all or
nothing" systems. Perhaps you should start your research here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_armor
Eugene L Griessel
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity:
they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
Jacob Bronowski
Frogwatch
> On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 17:55:47 -0700 (PDT), Musicman59
>
On the entrance to the target area of the old 3 MeV Van-de Graf
electron accelerator at Florida State University, there is a steel
door made from 4 thicknesses of 4" thick armor plating taken from
scrapped ships in the late 50s. Two of these have holes that were
supposedly made from some type of shell hitting them. The holes are
about 1" wide at the outside and maybe 3/8' on the inside with smooth
sorta melted sides. I vaguely remember the story was they came from
ships being scrapped at Panama City, FL.
Ray OHara
"Frogwatch" <dbo...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:c9276253-7a4f-4339...@u34g2000yqu.googlegroups.com...
=================================================================================
at the Washington{DC} Navy Yard there is a section of armor for the Yamato
class ships.
it has a big tear in it where a U.S. 16 inch shell was tested on it.
but it is in good enough shape that you can see how it was placed in the
belt.
Mark Borgerson
540f41...@u34g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>, dbo...@mindspring.com
says...
and construction of instruments . It doesn't incorporate any
C14 or other radioactive isotopes widely distributed as
a result of atmospheric nuclear testing. I wonder if that
door is using the old armor for that reason.
Mark Borgerson
Malcom "Mal" Reynolds
<c9276253-7a4f-4339-a3c6-540f41b121fb@u3
4g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>,
Frogwatch <dbo...@mindspring.com>
wrote:
What is the point of having what amounts
to a 16" steel door if there is a hole
thru one of the 4" layers?
--
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Richard Casady
<mborg...@comcast.net> wrote:
>IIRC, old stel is very valuable now for shielding
>and construction of instruments . It doesn't incorporate any
>C14 or other radioactive isotopes widely distributed as
>a result of atmospheric nuclear testing. I wonder if that
>door is using the old armor for that reason.
>
Of course it is not very valuable. There is a near infinite supply of
the stuff, and a tiny demand. You don't have to use contaminated air
to make steel. All coal and iron ore is older than manmade nuclear
isotopes. Very little radioactive dust makes it through an oxygen
still. You can make a little bitty blast furnace and feed it filtered
air,you can remelt old steel in an electric furnace but they don't.
They use scrap as is, and it costs scrap prices. This is where I came
in, about twelve years ago.
By the way, C-14 is made in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, not
the fission and fusion reactions used in weapons and the Chernoble
reactor. [Way to go Ivan.] You did mention other.
Then there is non shielding, to digress a bit. When the US did a huge
fusion explosion on some atoll, they wanted to measure the neutrons.
So they put the instrument two miles from ground zero, so it could
survive. Zero neutrons would make it through two miles of air, so they
built a shed filled with helium, in balloons, since He simply does not
absorb neutrons. The neutrons were long gone before the fireball got
out of the casing, of course. [The shed was long gone before any
papers got published.]
Casady
Richard Casady
<mborg...@comcast.net> wrote:
>IIRC, old stel is very valuable now for shielding
>and construction of instruments . It doesn't incorporate any
>C14 or other radioactive isotopes widely distributed as
>a result of atmospheric nuclear testing. I wonder if that
>door is using the old armor for that reason.
Very isn't really the word. There is a tiny market for that, and a
large supply.There are alternatives.There is the basic oxygen process
which doesn't use air, radioactive dust laden, or not. So it has to be
cheaper than new steel to compete.
If it was worth hours of work I could find the old hard drive with my
similar post of about twelve years ago.
Casady
Mark Borgerson
richar...@earthlink.net says...
> On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 21:36:47 -0700, Mark Borgerson
> <mborg...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> >IIRC, old stel is very valuable now for shielding
> >and construction of instruments . It doesn't incorporate any
> >C14 or other radioactive isotopes widely distributed as
> >a result of atmospheric nuclear testing. I wonder if that
> >door is using the old armor for that reason.
> >
> Of course it is not very valuable. There is a near infinite supply of
> the stuff, and a tiny demand. You don't have to use contaminated air
> to make steel. All coal and iron ore is older than manmade nuclear
> isotopes. Very little radioactive dust makes it through an oxygen
> still. You can make a little bitty blast furnace and feed it filtered
> air,you can remelt old steel in an electric furnace but they don't.
> They use scrap as is, and it costs scrap prices. This is where I came
> in, about twelve years ago.
I was just passing on information from hazegray.org:
http://www.hazegray.org/faq/smn7.htm#G7
"In 1995 it was announced that about 100 German WWII U-boats would be
salvaged off the Scottish coast. These submarines were scuttled after
the end of the war during Operation Deadlight, the disposal of the
captured U-boat fleet. Because they were scuttled, there is no issue of
them being war graves, as vessels sunk in combat would be. The reasons
behind the salavge have been questioned, as raising a batch of U-boats
doesn't seem to be a particularly economical way of getting scrap metal.
In reality, the ship are not being salvaged to be cut up and melted down
as ordinary scrap. These U-boats represent one of the last readily
available sources of non-radioactive steel, and are being salvaged for
that "clean" steel.
All steel made since the detonation of the first atom bomb in 1945 has
contained tiny amounts of radioactivity. This is because the atmosphere
now contains trace amounts of radioactivity. The steelmaking process
involves the use of large amounts of air, which transfers the
radioactivity to the steel. Instruments and equipment used for measuring
radioactivity must be free from extra background radiation, so post-1945
"new" steel cannot be used for these purposes. Instead, pre-1945
"clean" steel is used. The steel is obtained from the scrapping of pre-
1945 ships, and a considerable amount has been obtained from the German
ships scuttled in Scapa Flow at the end of WWI. Obviously, steel
obtained from these relatively limited sources is much more valuable
than normal steel. The existing sources for "clean" steel have mostly
dried up, so the salvage of the U-Boats is economically justifiable now.
The submarines will not be melted down after salvage, rather, plates cut
from the hulls will be used in their current form.
However, since the announcement of the salvage rights in 1995,
everything has grown quiet, and there may be no actual salvage activity,
now or in the future."
Perhaps that last paragraph reflects reduced demand and the ability to
make small amounts of clean steel by avoiding air contamination.
The only recent news about salvaging u-boats concerns one of the
scuttled subs being raised to be preserved as a tourist
attraction.
>
> By the way, C-14 is made in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, not
> the fission and fusion reactions used in weapons and the Chernoble
> reactor. [Way to go Ivan.] You did mention other.
You're right about the C14---I shouldn't have included it it the
list, as old steel wasn't manufactured to minimize contact with
atmospheric CO2.
You can avoid C-14 by avoiding the use of air in the
production process. Filtering the other contaminant should also be
possible, but I think the resulting steel will still be more expensive
than ordinary steel.
>
> Then there is non shielding, to digress a bit. When the US did a huge
> fusion explosion on some atoll, they wanted to measure the neutrons.
> So they put the instrument two miles from ground zero, so it could
> survive. Zero neutrons would make it through two miles of air, so they
> built a shed filled with helium, in balloons, since He simply does not
> absorb neutrons. The neutrons were long gone before the fireball got
> out of the casing, of course. [The shed was long gone before any
> papers got published.]
Mark Borgerson
Mark Borgerson
richar...@earthlink.net says...
> On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 21:36:47 -0700, Mark Borgerson
> <mborg...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> >IIRC, old stel is very valuable now for shielding
> >and construction of instruments . It doesn't incorporate any
> >C14 or other radioactive isotopes widely distributed as
> >a result of atmospheric nuclear testing. I wonder if that
> >door is using the old armor for that reason.
>
> Very isn't really the word. There is a tiny market for that, and a
> large supply.There are alternatives.There is the basic oxygen process
> which doesn't use air, radioactive dust laden, or not. So it has to be
> cheaper than new steel to compete.
I think you're probably right---there doesn't seem to have been a
lot of recent salvage of large amounts of old steel. It's
greatest value may be as historical momentos.
>
> If it was worth hours of work I could find the old hard drive with my
> similar post of about twelve years ago.
>
Mark Borgerson
Moramarth
> I think you're probably right---there doesn't seem to have been a
> lot of recent salvage of large amounts of old steel. It's
> greatest value may be as historical momentos.
at Sellafield are shielded by old warship armour, and each sported a
photo of the donor.
One was a KGV class battleship, Anson or Howe. The second was HMS
Lion, the post war (completed, but started pre-1945) cruiser. The
last, I believe built some time after the others, had plates salvaged
from the WW1 wreck of HMS Natal (the armoured cruiser) in the Cromarty
Firth. This suggests at one point the supply was drying up, but my
recollection is about a quarter century old, and supplies of new
"clean" material may be available. My impression at the time was that
the plates were used in their original form, secured inside a
framework of beams independent of the building's structure.
>
Regards,
>
> Mark Borgerson
Moramarth
Peter Granzeau
<atlas-...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>What is the point of having what amounts
>to a 16" steel door if there is a hole
>thru one of the 4" layers?
The person to ask is surely the one who specified the 4-layer door. If
a hole (and it's quite small) is acceptable, surely the specs indicated
that 4 layers was overkill, and the small amount of radiation the hole
would pass would be acceptable?
Eugene Griessel
wrote:
We are getting rather far from answering the original question which
was how the armour is fastened to the ship. I have done a slew of
reading up and looking at pictures but the last thing anyone writing
about battleships tells you is how the armour of that particular class
is affixed. Some of them do say "bolted" but that is more or less in
throwaway phrases which might not actually mean "physically affixed
with bolts". Of note is Vanguard, of which I have some excellent
close-ups, where the main armour belt is pierced by dozens of outlet
pipes. One would have thought the constructors would have come up
with a better solution! What did they do on the Iowas - best I can
find is a statement "attached directly to the hull plates". Was it
welded on or bolted on? Being internal it was probably slightly less
critical than an external belt.
Eugene L Griessel
Multitasking = screwing up several things at once.
Malcom "Mal" Reynolds
<shbnr51plfu070bsfnmqfbv1l6snhgr56i@4ax.
com>,
Peter Granzeau <pgra...@cox.net>
wrote:
I'd like to think that the procurement
person would have done a better job with
that particular layer. I'd also like to
think that no matter the level of
overkill, perhaps plugging that hole
would have added just a little bit more
overkill.
Richard Casady
<mborg...@comcast.net> wrote:
>You can avoid C-14 by avoiding the use of air in the
>production process. Filtering the other contaminant should also be
>possible, but I think the resulting steel will still be more expensive
>than ordinary steel.
My point is that they make new steel without air.
It is called the basic oxygen process, and uses dust free oxygen from
distilling liquid air. any dust ends up in the liquid nitrogen. It
done in something very like a Bessimer converter. Instead of air from
below it uses pure oxygen administered with a central lance from
above. The Ivans probably invented the process, they have long been
the 'Czars' of steel and metallurgy in general.We licence continous
casting of steel, in a manner similar to glass making, from them.You
extrude, say, railroad rail, in a continuous ribbon from white hot to
cold. You cut it to length, a half mile or more, the length of a
freight train. It bends to fit the curves on the flat cars as well as
after it is laid. Bending them must suck energy, but a work train
doesn't absolutely have to have blinding speed.
As for the ingredients, you can rinse the coal and iron ore with
distilled water for not prohibitive cost.
As for carbon 14, again air free, and you don't need steel for
shielding and instrument parts. How strong does a Geiger counter
chassis have to be? Surely nearly carbon free iron would do. They make
lots of that now, for the corrosion resistance.
Don't try to tell me there us a demand for half a million tons of
U-boat hull plates, and note that unscuttleing one might be fairly
simple. Close valves and hatches and add air., they are should be
basically airtight. WWII US boats had fittings on the outside of the
hull so a diver can add so called salvage air.I don't think they would
use expensive explosives when opening a deck hatch would do the job
nicely. How often is the north sea flat calm. Maybe they disposed of
all the leftover torpedos and depth charges at the same time, and talk
of salvaging smitherines is ridiculous. I am waiting for Paul Adam to
come up with a fact or two, and he was around when I posted on this
exact subject twelve years ago.
Someone posted about a door made from four four inch slabs of armor,
that might have been belt armor from a cruiser. It is possible it was
deck material from a battleship, but if you have access to the
scrapping of a BB it would be a total crying shame not to get the
conning tower door, one piece 18 inches thick, and possiblly cheaper.
The navy might even donate the steel but the labor for the kludge
would cost plenty. I can't remember where the four inch stuff was?
Cruiser turret roofs? Whatever. How many astrophysics grad students
are artists with a monster cutting torch? Probably at least one who
worked hard in high school to escape the family business of cutting up
ships,locomotives, and water towers. I would pound books 100 hours a
week for ten years to escape that.
Casady
Keith Willshaw
"Richard Casady" <richar...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:j7kmr5ten010rd8id...@4ax.com...
> On Tue, 6 Apr 2010 07:37:13 -0700, Mark Borgerson
> <mborg...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>You can avoid C-14 by avoiding the use of air in the
>>production process. Filtering the other contaminant should also be
>>possible, but I think the resulting steel will still be more expensive
>>than ordinary steel.
>
> My point is that they make new steel without air.
> It is called the basic oxygen process, and uses dust free oxygen from
> distilling liquid air. any dust ends up in the liquid nitrogen.
Trouble is this process does not remove trace radioisotopes, its
a relatively simple distillation process and the oxygen produced
is fairly impure. Medical oxygen is much more carefully
controlled.
> It
> done in something very like a Bessimer converter. Instead of air from
> below it uses pure oxygen administered with a central lance from
> above. The Ivans probably invented the process, they have long been
> the 'Czars' of steel and metallurgy in general.
It was invented by the Austrian company Voestalpine in Linz.
Keith
j...@cix.compulink.co.uk
eug...@dynagen.co.za (Eugene Griessel) wrote:
> We are getting rather far from answering the original question which
> was how the armour is fastened to the ship. I have done a slew of
> reading up and looking at pictures but the last thing anyone writing
> about battleships tells you is how the armour of that particular class
> is affixed.
It worked, approximately, like this. This is mainly from memory, and
probably biased towards British practices.
The armour was made in pieces much smaller than the side of a BB,
something like 10' x 20'. This meant that there were several rows of
pieces along the side of the ship.
A given piece of armour would start as a large ingot, and be rolled to
shape - including its part of the curve of the hull. It then went
through a lengthy and elaborate process of heat-treatment and case-
hardening on its outside face, often called "cementing". The idea was
that the front face would be extremely hard, to try to shatter impacting
shells, although thus inevitably somewhat brittle, while the back would
be softer and tougher. When the hardening process was complete, it would
be trimmed to exact size by grinding - it is far too hard to cut by this
stage - and then transported to the shipyard.
Armour was commonly bolted to the ship's structure by long bolts that
started inside the ship and screwed into tapped holes in the back of the
armour plates. There was usually a "backing" to the armour of
shock-absorbing material, since when an armour plate was hit, it would
inevitably deliver a considerable kick to the ship. A few inches of teak
(for the non-rotting properties) was the usual backing material.
Clever designers would put a neck in the securing bolts such that if the
armour plate rebounded from the backing with too much force, the bolts
would break. This might lead to an armour plate falling off, but this
was preferable to pulling the bolt heads through the ship's structure,
in which case the plate falls off anyway and you have holes in the ship.
Yes, some quite large forces are involved in this kind of event.
That's the general idea, but there were quite a few variations.
Sometimes people tried to dovetail plates together to get better
resistance at the joints. The problem with that was that the plates were
quite often damaged by hits, and always distorted slightly, and trying
to slide the dovetails apart after the plate got distorted was really
tough. The USN had a clever variation, whereby the vertical edges of
plates had keyways in them, and clamping rods were chilled with liquid
nitrogen and could then be fitted fairly easily. Not sure how easy this
was to dismantle in practice.
Deck armour was significantly different. It wasn't normally
face-hardened, and it could be used as structural material if you
wanted, although it generally wasn't.
> What did they do on the Iowas - best I can find is a statement
> "attached directly to the hull plates". Was it welded on or bolted
> on?
Wouldn't have been welded: presumably bolting. The heat of welding could
mess up the heat treatment, and you don't want to make holes for rivets
through 12" plate.
--
John Dallman, j...@cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
ken...@cix.compulink.co.uk
richar...@earthlink.net (Richard Casady) wrote:
> My point is that they make new steel without air.
Steel making is the process of converting cast iron to steel by
reducing the carbon content. It is not the process of producing iron. As
I understand it both the Bessemer process and the basic oxygen process
require molten iron produced by a blast furnace as input. Blast furnaces
use air. Steel and iron scrap is either melted in an induction furnace
and added to the cast iron or used as is in the open hearth process.
By the way most of the High Seas Fleet was salvaged between the wars
not after Hiroshima. The belt armour on those was probably melted down
as cemented armour is nearly impossible to machine or work. The plates
had to be machined before cementing.
Ken Young
ken...@cix.compulink.co.uk
> Was it
> welded on or bolted on? Being internal it was probably slightly less
> critical than an external belt
Armour was held on by bolts that did not go through, vertical loads
were handled by an armour shelf. As far as I know everything thicker
than 3 inches was separate from the structure and attached by bolts.
Some light cruisers had the armour as part of the structure. Originally
armour was backed by originally wood and later mild steel backing. This
not only helped stop splinters but also damped bolt loads. Better bolt
design and more understanding of the forces involved allowed this
backing to be first reduced and eventually abandoned. There were usually
massive frames behind the armour to prevent it being pushed back which
actually happened to Lion IIRC.
I am almost certain that it was never possible to weld armour as the
alloys were unsuitable.
Ken Young
Frogwatch
> In article <chcnr59oc0o8q83np55vgteet1hnv4u...@4ax.com>,
These 4" thick pieces must have been from a smaller ship because I
never heard of a BB or cruiser being taken apart at Panama City
Florida which is where the steel plate was supposed to be from. There
are bolt holes through the plate and the plates are held together by
them. Dunno if the holes are original or not, seems unlikely they are
original. On the edges, they were held together by straps welded
across. The edges had clearly been cut by a torch of some kind. As
far as I know, these doors are still in use.