Thread veer? Huh?
The CVNs do a decent job at armor. The topside spaces and all the perimeter fuel tanks are sacrificial metal. By the time you get well inside the ship you hit an armored box where pretty much all the vital systems live. Other nice touches like interrupted weapons elevators, massive systems redundancy, and AEGIS guard dogs make them rather survivable.
Eh, I'll leave the CVN armor subject alone for my previous reason. Blast baffles and such on weapons elevators are nothing new however, again a dreadnaught era innovation. It was such baffles that kept the Iowa #2 Turret explosion contained to the turret and prevented it from propagating to the weapons magazines and causing a Hood/Arizona-esque high order detonation.
I still think they should bring back the BBs. Never happen, but how nice it would be to put a hull like that out there and put a nuke plant in it. Pretty much the biggest floating go F! yourself statement we could have short of nukes. At the end they carried lots of tomahawks too. Now the gun wizards are doing enhanced range stuff for the 5" guns that is supposed to fly something like 70+ miles and penetrate 20 some feet of concrete. That's handy and all, but can we scale it up to 16"? Failing that I would settle for lining all 5 of our newly converted SSGNs off the coast of whoever has us irritated, expending all their missiles, then sailing home. Diplomacy, pissy imperialist style.
The only problem with the rocket assisted 5" projectiles is they are extremely light weight. Something that small, where you are sacrificing additional mass for a rocket motor etc. just doesn't have the same kinetic force and to be honest
any claims of "penetrating 20 feet of concrete" is a joke, unless it's that bubble infused stuff that they are putting at the end of runways to allow airplanes to sink in and skid to a stop. (ETA:)
I take that back. If you used a solid kinetic penetrator arcing down from such a high loft it would be feasible, but then what good would it be when it lands? It would make a neat little hole 20 feet deep in a hunk of concrete with no area effects at all. As for adapting that over to the big bore guns, yes it has already been done. First attempt was a 10" 500lb solid tungsten kinetic penetrator saboted up to 16" in. It had a range of approximately 100-110 nautical miles. The second attempt was a full sized 16" high capacity shell with a rocket assist like the 5" and 155mm shells. It's range was an absurd 450+ nautical miles and was able to readily use the GPS or laser guidance systems as tested in the 155mm Excalibur and Copperhead projectiles. Makes me wonder if it wasn't bordering on the definition of a medium range ballistic missile at that point.
But tell me, from a ground pounder's point of view. Which would you rather have on call for fire support: 50-75 pound 5" shells, or 1900-2700 pound 16" shells? (The weight is for the navy 5" experimental projectiles, not the Army/Marines 155mm Excalibur/Copperhead shells.)
Oh, on the Iowa class I'd assume that the easiest soft kill with conventional weapons would be a wake homing torpedo to eat the screws off. Of course it would probably still float. Then the gunners would wait patiently for the thing to drift around where they could line up a turret at your navy/country/whatever.
They might have a hard time at that. The two inner screws are shrouded by the drive shaft suspension of the two outer screws. You could toast the rudder and outer screws pretty hard, but after divers cut away the mangled remains of each she would still be able to limp home and use independent screw speed adjustments to control course (I was helmsman qualified on my ship many moons ago and so got to learn how to do some neat stuff like that). Besides those big turrets can train 150 degrees from centerline and shoot "over the shoulder." There is no "blind spot" to hide in. :) Of course, just for the sake of noting it, the battleships formed their own "BBG" or Battleship Battle Group and had their own destroyers and cruisers to act as sub screens and what not. They never lone wolfed it which seems to be a wide misconception.
