The Drydock - Episode 062

Silly question- you've organized some ship design contests and have mentioned some kind of software or something to design them- I think you're saying, 'springshop', but I have no idea what that is. Being a US Navy FC and not a gamer, could you post a link or something that explains what it is you are talking about?

Vintage Car History

Zarcon: I'm not sure what you are saying; however to perhaps clear things a little; the physical crystalline bonds inside armour steel because of the special heat processing during cooling are of a different character of structural steel; the armour steel bonds are rigid and have a greater bond energy to their neighbours but because of their rigidity they do not bend like structural steel before breaking therefore armoured steel bonds will break catastrophically creating a domino effect within the structure causing crack propagation in the steel this makes the armoured steel brittle it does not bend a lot and shears the bond. the flexing a a structure at the will of nature needs steel which bends and returns to shape; this is a character that belongs to structural steel by the way in which it is cooled; high impact will more easily damage locally but will not affect throughout the steel the vibrational energies transmitted through armoured steel due to its internal molecular bond stiffness .

John Hargreaves

John Hargreaves, my bad. so we are saying the same thing from opposite angles, lol. That and the vast size of a ship vs insignificant sized critical parts inside, is the more important angle any way for that Q. Edit, and the other similar Q, the single critical point of structural failure is also of bigger importance.

ZarconDeeGrissom

the one time I was busy and didn't get a chance to watch before public viewing, first Q of the vid. I figured cannons were heavy, I didn't know they were that heavy on ships of the line. Thanks for answering that canon recoil Q Drach. B)

ZarconDeeGrissom

hu, doesn't armor also not bend, to some extent. otherwise, how do they have them solid (minus welds) massive slabs of 12-inch thick or so (I think that's roughly about 30.48 Coffee Mounds in metric) running down the length of the side of the ship (the belt armor according to my Before Coffee un-caffeinated memory)? I may be mistaken, however, I don't recall ever seeing slip-joints or pivots or expansion-joints or anything other than a solid massive slab that extended down a tad below the waterline, on the side of CVN-70 from about 60 to maybe 150 meters away during a lot of UNREPs (stories for some other time maybe). I think there is a dif between being so overbuilt the structure doesn't flex much vs being "week and ridged" (AKA brittle), I beam vs truss. And if you think about it, you don't really want your armor brittle like glass, because it needs to absorb a lot of energy from the projectile(s), not just instantly transmit the forces to the rest of the ship up to breaking point, lol. (ok, foot in mouth, time to watch the vid to see what the fuss is about, lol)

ZarconDeeGrissom

Drach - I know you have a rules about 1980’s to current but can we talk about CVN 65 , at the first nuclear carrier , you could cover her early career

Continue again (I keep pressing the wrong key) : The design of platform did not affect modern weapons i.e. anti-ship missile launch but did significantly help gun accuracy, this factor was not considered a major advantage for ship use; the other advantage was that the wide profile of the outer hulls were suppose to also protect vitals. Kind regards

John Hargreaves

To continue last comment; one of the prime reasons for the experimental craft was the ability of a trimaran was the gun platform (and missile platform) stability, The ability to provide a stable firing platform was an increase in accuracy of aiming on a significantly stable platform at sea.

John Hargreaves

I presume that the LCS Independence was based on the prototype trimaran that was built one third scale as a joint US/RN one third scale experiment by Vospers ( a project on which I had some input).

John Hargreaves

Thanks, I knew I'd forgotten to mention something

Drachinifel

A note on armour plate used as a structural part of a ship (I am sure you know this as an engineer): the characteristics of armour plate is not suitable in terms of flexibility without cracking to take the bending moments of a ship at sea as it will be more brittle than structural steel and will fracture losing the integrity of the ships structure and therefor the ship will founder without any enemy action just by the force of the sea. It is an important factor in the seaworthiness of the ship. Like all structure they should bend and return to shape by design in order to absorb the forces of nature.

John Hargreaves