The development of the Naval Shell - Stop poking holes in my ship!

[Music] okay so this could be a topic that gets way off track and way out of hand so there's some rather specific limiters in place for this video we're going to be talking about naval artillery only and more specifically about the more common shot and shell types used in the last hundred years or so of the era of the big gun i.e around 1850 to 1950 we're also not going to be talking all that much about loading propellant driving bands or other similar subjects unless they're directly relevant to the matter being specifically discussed broadly there are two main lines of development ammunition designed primarily to blow things up and ammunition designed primarily to get deep inside the enemy ship and then possibly blow things up so we're going to primarily cover the latter what these days might be called armor-piercing ammunition and mention the other as and when it becomes relevant as to be perfectly honest the concept of filling a projectile with a large amount of explosive and sending it at your enemy is relatively uncomplicated compared to the dynamics of armor-piercing now the development of the armor-piercing projectile broadly parallels the developments for ship's armor for which there is already a video this synergistic relationship is fairly obvious if a certain ammunition is bad for the continued survival of your ship you try to invent a way of protecting yourself from it and then the other guy goes off to refine the existing ammunition or invent a new type which can get past your improved protection and so on and so on and so on until pretty much the present day this all starts with the tail end of the age of sail where the good old iron cannonball had been the primary anti-ship shot of choice for hundreds of years this was a basic iron sphere more close enough for government work with the diameter slightly less than the bore of the gun itself to allow for manufacturing variations this could then be fired at the enemy's wooden hull from a range of technically up to three miles but more realistically and practically the upper hundreds of yards at most down to i literally have the mouth of my gun pressed against the hull of your ship at the closest ranges this difference between technical range and the ability to actually hit anything would persist throughout pretty much all of the gun era with the only time the two vaguely marrying up being around the early part of world war one but that's more to do with fire control again done in a separate video at the longer ranges that these projectiles could hit realistically the defenses of a thick wooden hull and or a hull that was made of especially tough wood such as oak with live or white oak being especially good at this as well as the angle of the shot might cause a shot to bounce off or simply embed itself in the side of a ship but at closer ranges even the thickest of hulls found on first-rate ships of the line would be vulnerable to all but the smallest and weakest cannon shot however it would take quite a while to batter an enemy ship into submission simply by poking holes in it let alone actually making it sink the main effect of the cannonball was actually to kill crew and dismount guns thus forcing a surrender sinking ships outright by gunfire could and did happen as did the understandably hot iron balls either setting something on fire or even making their own way to the ship's magazines either way eventually causing a ship killing explosion but these were very rare instances whose occurrences were almost always written about extensively and can at times appear to be somewhat more common than they actually were simply because of the sheer number of ship-to-ship combats that took place in the age of sale as well as the number of shots fired in all of those engagements since if you roll enough dice you will eventually get enough natural 20s after all but by the 1850s whilst solid shots still had its uses there were a number of competitors in the ship killing business red hot shot was the simplest of these in theory but very difficult to execute safely in practice this called for the heating of iron shot which would happen to a degree anyway when the projectile was fired but to a point that the iron would take on a shockingly red glow extreme care and a somewhat different loading technique would then have to be taken to avoid the heat of the ball setting off the charge of the gun whilst the loading process was underway the problem was that to heat an iron ball in that manner required a fairly intense flame or a repurposing of the ship's galley and of course bought a wooden ship an intense flame was a very dangerous and unwelcome thing especially if you had it in the open area like a gun deck that was subject to enemy fire which might very well end up blowing the furnace rather counterproductively all over your own ship having the furnace or furnaces elsewhere in the ship such as using the ship's galley positioned below the water line would be safer in that aspect but would then mean you'd have dozens of people running all over the ship carrying red hot balls of iron which presents all new safety hazards as well as running the very real risk that by the time the ammunition actually reached the gun it would have cooled substantially anyway making the whole exercise much less useful as a result red hot shot was largely restricted to use in shore fortifications where being made of stone earth or brick having nearby fires to the guns wasn't as much of a hazard although there were some notable instances where ships carrying the equipment or jewelry rigging equipment usually using the galley stove to prepare red hot shot did score some rather spectacular successes next up was martin's shell this was coming into use right at the end of the 1850s and took the idea of red hot shot one step further it used a hollow shell that was then filled with molten iron from an even more energetic furnace the aim being that after landing on the enemy deck or penetrating the enemy ship the shell would break apart scattering the molten iron all over anything nearby that would burn wood paint rope tar people gun powder etc the immense amount of energy stored in the molten metal would make fire fighting almost impossible as not only would the affected area be much larger than the relatively point location of a red hot shot but the sheer amount of energy involved would mean that even throwing water over it would only temporarily smother the flames if you were lucky until the latent heat boiled all the water off and restarted the fire as most firefighting in this period was still the domain of the hand-drawn bucket as opposed to organized pump and hose efforts lastly of course was the explosive shell which would of course in various forms eventually be developed as the primary ammunition type but in this period with wooden hull still able to be penetrated by both shot and shell it was just in the running as basic anti-ship munition by the mid-19th century the shell had developed to look superficially like a normal cannonball but would contain a charge of gunpowder and a fuse that was ignited by the burning of the gun powder that was used in the gun propellant charge the projectile would then theoretically fly into an enemy ship and the fuse would burn out and the shell would explode adding blast effects and shrapnel as well as heat and kinetic impact to the damage equation it had some issues shells with more explosive and thinner walls tended to break apart on impact with the powder within then burning off relatively harmlessly outside and as shots to the hull would often come into contact with the sea or at least wave tops and spray on their way across the shell could also find the fuse put out in mid-flight by this contact assuming that it also wasn't put out by the shock of firing poor alignment with the airflow the shock of the impact or some enterprising crewman running up with a bucket of water or just throwing the shell overboard if the fuse still had a few seconds left to burn and somebody was feeling especially heroic so it wasn't entirely a perfect weapon so the ironclad age dawned with all four projectile types heated shot normal shot martin shell and the explosive shell still in common use but now with ships covered in iron armor there was a problem thick enough armor simply shattered shells and bounced or stopped iron balls hot or not cold there appeared to be a few potential solutions to the problem and just before the ironclad debuted the rifled cannon had made an appearance and allowed for an elongated shot to be made this resembled a very basic gigantic bullet and thus the shot could be made more massive through length without increasing the diameter of the gun and thus it could carry more energy to the target exerting that energy over a smaller area relative to its mass compared to a spherical shot and thus having better penetration this was assisted by advances in propellant and mentality better forms of gunpowder sent the shot through the air at higher speeds and better metallurgy allowed for the development of basic steel shot instead of iron this harder shot was more likely to make the iron of a ship's armor deform first before it did since it was harder as opposed to iron shot which could be softer than the iron used on the ship itself especially since it had just been heated and this in turn improved armor penetration but steel making in the 1860s was still a very new technology on an industrial scale with the bessemer process which was required to produce steel in anything like the quantities and consistency that was needed for naval artillery still working out various issues and in any case the much harder steel could shatter like glass upon impact depending on the exact nature of the steel shot and the iron armor involved and the relative temperature of both because remember the behavior of a lot of iron at this point was dictated by what temperature the sea it was in actually was you could just make an absolutely massive gun and just hit your enemy with enough force to more or less simply cave in that relevant part of the ship and smash your way through as opposed to anything as elegant as actually punching a neat hole in the foe dolgren guns proved especially good at this although a well-built and well-braced hull with a thick enough plate could resist this kind of massive attack much better than it could resist a small high-speed projectile that carried roughly the same overall energy in the latter half of the 1860s a new solution presented itself in the form of the palacer shot which was developed somewhat unironically by one major palacer this used cast iron for the shot itself but it used a differential cooling to achieve a result that had the same basic principles that would be used decades later in the production of harvey and then crop steel armor plate when the shot was being cast the nose end of the mold was facing down and thus it was filled first this part of the mould was made of metal and chilled with cold water whilst the body of the shop mold was formed sand and not cooled thus the nose of the shot cooled very quickly and the rest of the body cooled much more slowly and this led to the formation of a very hard nose and a softer body the harder nose was effective at punching into and through the armor whilst the softer body allowed for the absorption of the energy involved in the impact of the collision without the shell simply shattering apart as early steel shot was want to do in keeping the shot in one piece and thus allowing the penetration to continue and for more details of exactly how that process works let's see the video on armor now it's probably best to explain at this point why the relative hardness of the materials used in a projectile and in armor matters so much so this is the physics section part one of three it's all to do at its root with pressure which of course is the force exerted over a given area any given material of a given length or area can be destroyed torn ripped displaced broken or whatever other appellative is appropriate by exerting a given amount of force on it thus resulting in a certain amount of pressure however if that force is spread too widely or over sufficient time the amount of energy that's exerted will simply deform the material to some degree without breaking it conversely ensuring that the impact takes place over a short period of time or over a small area or ideally both means that the pressure exerted is greater and the material is more likely to break and this can be simply illustrated at least in terms of the surface area element by dropping a tennis ball onto a sheet of card the card deforms a little bit but the ball just bounces off but stick a needle in or on the ball and now that same force okay maybe slightly fractionally increase thanks to the weight of the needle but that's not by any appreciable about really we'll now punch straight through the card hardness and indeed rigidity of the material comes into play at this point assuming you've concentrated enough force over a small enough area to theoretically penetrate your target material if the material that you're trying to penetrate is harder than the incoming projectile because the concentration of force acts on both objects chances are that it's the projectile that will start to deform first this in turn will cause the projectile to spread out increasing the target area and thus lowering the pressure and thus causing a failure to penetrate conversely if the projectile is harder than the target then it's likely that the target will deform first which is what you want as it means that some of the target material is being moved out of the way some of it's being shoved backwards and some of it might even tear all of which adds up to the penetration that you want either until the projectile's kinetic energy is completely absorbed at which point the shot stops its forward progress or the target runs out of material along the lines of advance and thus the projectile can continue on its merry way there are all sorts of additional caveats to this in terms of friction density and such but it suffices as a basic introduction to the concept the big caveat is that your projectile can be too hard or brittle since remember we said force acts in both directions if the projectile is so hard that it doesn't deform much if at all then the force that's exerted on it will instead of deforming it slightly going to breaking it apart shattering and then the projectile is pretty much useless to anyone as the energy makes the fragments fly in all directions instead of working as a single object heading forward this is why shells are not made of glass for instance obviously a projectile might be able to withstand this impact at one speed but if the speed is cranked up or the energy level is increased in another way say by using a larger projectile that you fire at the same speed then it might not survive as the point at which it yields may have been surpassed and your projectile even if it's harder than the target armor will break up material limitations in this regard as well as the habit of guns exploding was one of the driving factors behind larger lower velocity weapons like the dolgrens as opposed to high-speed shot-firing guns like the 68-pounder in the 1850s and 1860s but that's enough physics for now at least until we get into the higher speed hardened projectiles when we'll need to delve back into it a couple more times to talk about shock effects and armor-piercing caps there was a sub-variant of the palacer shot the palace shell which would see a brief heyday as this shell was a little bit longer than the shot because it needed to contain an explosive core the idea being that the shock of the impact would cause the explosives contained within to detonate so it didn't have its own separate detonator and then the explosion would either drive the hardened tip of the shot in further due to the explosive force of the shell if the shell was still in the process of penetration or else it would make the shell go off like a grenade if the shell was already most or all of the way through the armor by the time the internal buildup of pressure caused the shell to shatter the palace a shot and subtle variations on it would become the standard armor-piercing projectile for quite some time when it came to the 19th century but eventually the advent of the first compound and then pure steel armors diminished their overall effectiveness since the steel face of compound armor and the well entirely steel nature of all steel armor made them potentially considerably stronger than the chilled cast iron of the palace a shot and flipped the overall equation that it relied on on its head pallas a shell was of a little help as they would just detonate while the shell was still trying to punch through putting an end to both palace a shot and shell as frontline ammunition by the late 1880s realistically with their main claim to fame being the battle of angamos where chilean warships were able to use large palace a shot to overcome the peruvian ironclad quaskar which had until that point proven to be pretty resistant to almost any other kind of projectile people had thrown at it their subsequent use in the bombardment of alexandria alongside palace a shell was somewhat less impressive serving alongside these shells was the developing so-called common shell this was basically a similar roughly cone-headed cylinder as a palace a shot or shell only it had much thinner walls a fuse mounted right on the nose and an interior full of gunpowder we might think of this as an early high-explosive shell the gunpowder isn't actually a high explosive so whilst the intended effect of a big blast and fire with minimal and armor-piercing properties is pretty much the same it's not technically accurate at this point to call it a high-explosive shell during this period there was also the so-called double common shell that was just a longer version which was designed to carry even more explosive but their greater mass made them somewhat slower and their length made them somewhat unstable so common shell remained the default choice if you were just shooting at general targets and wanted a nice big explosion whilst palace are shot and its equivalents would persist in service with various navies for a surprisingly long period of time only really being removed from service in the late 1900s its replacement as a front line piece of ammunition such as it was amounted to basically the same kind of thing only now made with forged steel with the tips hardened by quenching in cold liquids there was however one rapidly developing problem in amongst all the new explosives longer gun barrels and breech loading mechanisms that were beginning to enhance the sheer speed at which the projectiles could be sent the enemy's way size that wasn't the size of the shell but rather the size of the ships as we mentioned at the outset the aim of solid shot back in the age of sale had mainly been centered around the secondary effects of taking out guns and men either directly or via generating splinters in a battle of first rates against say 180 foot long wooden hull where practically anywhere you hit was likely to have something or someone important relatively close by in the vicinity and you have about 50 chances per salvo to actually hit something this was a relatively decent way of doing things but by the start of the 1880s ships were twice as long and large areas of the ship would be relatively empty in terms of tactically important components like gun crews the guns themselves and the machinery and with the main battery reduced to less than half a dozen guns the number of things to hit had gone down quite considerably your chances to hit have also dropped since firing four big solid shot into such target and then hoping that even assuming you managed to hit that they found something important in there was getting towards increasingly long odds not to mention that reload times had gone through the roof hence the development of the smaller secondary and tertiary batteries using shells filled with explosive designed set everything on fire instead but that's tactics as a result of gunnery not specifically about the shells but to be honest even assuming you punched through the armor frankly a 17-inch hole in the side of a 340 foot long ship was unlikely to be immediately fatal and although the shot would be somewhat hot from firing even a hit to a magazine might just result in some bemused crewmen stepping carefully around the annoying thing now wedged in the deck something capable of doing a bit more damage than an inert to lump of metal was needed the penetration had to be accompanied by devastation and for this the palace shell and similar devices were looked to they'd been dropped as anti-ship weapons at least against armoured targets because of the aforementioned issues with them simply exploding outside of the armor but they were still carried for use against unprotected or lightly protected ships and some shore targets with the new advances in explosive that brought gun cotton dynamite and everyone's favorite pytrick acid to the table in the form of lidite and cordite surely there was something that could be done to replace and enhance the effect of the old powder-filled pallasa shell sir andrew noble a highly skilled ship designer noted some of the problems towards the end of the 19th century he said firing against unarmed structures shell charges with gunpowder do not generally explode until they are some short distance within the side of a vessel but with gun cotton and lidite the shell may either be fired with a fuse and detonator so arrange that it will burst immediately on impact or it may be so arranged as to give rise to a slight delay in the first alternative a hole of very large dimensions will be made in the side of the ship in the second alternative the shell will probably burst inside making only a small hole in the side of the vessel but the full effects of the explosion and the destruction of the crew would undoubtedly be serious from the explosion taking place within the vessel where an attack is made against thin armor shell charged with gunpowder are more effective than high explosive shell as the former cannot begot to pass through the armor and burst inside i doubt if shell charged with any explosives can be got to pass through thick armor before exploding you can see from this that fuses seemed to hold the key as they could be set to delay the onset of the explosion but many were quite hesitant about using them as they had a long and unfortunate history of igniting and causing explosions when they were least wanted a one report of the time claimed that during the bombardment of fort fisher in the american civil war every single parrot gun in the union fleet had at some point burst due to the premature detonation of fused shells with 45 killed or wounded by these explosions against 11 killed or wounded by confederate fire when it looked like your own fuses might actually be a greater threat to you than the enemy was you can understand why people were hesitant to try and adopt this method advancement in this area was quite slow and in many cases it was actually led by countries with smaller navies that thus had ambitions to supplant the royal navy the french in particular led extensively in the latter 19th century to the point that in the 1880s and 1890s many royal navy ships carried imported french steel shot to supplement their still-carried palacer shot which at this point was more than like a slightly militant form of ballast for all the good it was likely to do against a modern armored vessel the single biggest problem was fuse sensitivity in order to survive passage through the armor the fuse for any armor-piercing shell had to be in the base and those based fused would either have to detonate immediately upon contact or else be crushed into oblivion by the process of punching through the plate but such a fuse would have to be activated by the force of the shell being fired and then being live from that point on it might still detonate early and this problem was much more pronounced with the new more sensitive lidite shells older gunpowder ones really blew up early these days but their explosive power was so meager compared to other explosives that for a short time it was actually not really considered worth having them this period would also see the advent of the common pointed shell this simply moved the fuse of the common shell from the nose to the base as the shell wasn't for use on armor the issues surrounding armor-piercing shells weren't present but the slight delay meant that they had a little bit more effect on unarmored targets than the older common shells as they'd at least be partially or fully within the target as they went off it would only actually be in 1903 that a shell capable of punching clean through the latest armor and then detonating behind it with an explosive payload reliably began to enter royal navy service but even at this stage it was still using gunpowder for safety reasons a year later the russo-japanese war broke out and it would be mainly the sheer size of the explosive charges in the japanese navy's shells combined with the fires that they caused that wrecked the russian fleet indeed at the battle of the loc numerous hits with the lydite filled armor-piercing shells either failed to detonate after passing clean through the armor and out the other side of the target ship or else they blew up on impact which looked spectacular but didn't actually accomplish all that much in addition almost a fifth of the japanese navy's heavy guns present were wrecked by premature detonations rather disappointed the japanese rapidly switched out the fuses in their remaining shells for some german ones that they had available and swapped out chunks of high explosive for the more stable gunpowder and then they turned up to tsushima with far more devastating salvos than the gun cotton-filled armor-piercing shells of the second pacific squadron which suffered many of the same problems the japanese had experienced at the battle of the loc despite scoring numerous hits this combination on the japanese side of the latest shells and explosives quickly retrofitted in the middle of a war finally delivered what most navies had been looking for a reliable big gun shell albeit the fires caused by the japanese shells had done a lot more damage than armor-penetrating shots and this tended to overall many naval officers for a few years to come since large portions of a ship are not protected by substantial armor it seemed better to use the common pointed shell with its large explosive payload and minimal penetration over the armor-piercing round which was somewhat less spectacular in its effects at least unless it hit something that was really important the adoption of the big gun however was not affected by this as thanks to the square cube law the bigger the gun the proportionally greater explosive payload could be carried and thus the development of all big gun designs would continue unabated still the fact that some of the biggest obstacles to a reliable armor-piercing shell had been overcome greatly encouraged the director of naval ordnance one john jelico who pressed for more work to be done in this area since he wanted to be able to hit and sink an enemy with his guns not just gradually attrite the enemy down using cumulative damage this resulted the next year in the development of a new type of armor-piercing shell or more properly armor-piercing capped or apc this combined the japanese changes of fuse with a mild steel cap that sat atop the shell's nose like an especially jaunty hat this worked to help the shell penetrate by flattening out like soft clay or dough upon impact something which should give you some idea of just how much energy was involved at this point since mild steel is now starting to flow like play-doh this would mean that the instant shock of a hardened steel nose meeting at the hardened plate armor of a ship could be expended in deforming the softer mild steel cap instead of shattering the nose and then the rest of the shell and thanks to the physics of high speed impacts the shock wave without the cap actually had two separate ways of breaking the shell obviously immediately when the shell hit but then again an instant later when the shock wave traveled back having reflected off the rear of the shell also incidentally initiating the fuse the shock wave then hitting the weakened and possibly already cracked nose and causing it to blow open this double shock effect is one of the reasons why when you see slow motion footage of bullets hitting steel plates they often seem to open out like a flower rather than just piling up into a disc now instead with an arm piercing cap any shock wave ended up going out into the expanding ring of what had formerly been the cap and blowing that out instead which has the helpful effect of adding a bunch of shrapnel to proceedings this initial blow from the cap would also start to dish in or crack the armor plate itself with any luck which in the next instant of time would greatly help the armor-piercing shell itself on its way through especially when it came to keeping the shell going in a straight line if it struck at anything other than a perfect 90 degree angle there is of course the chance that the armor if hard enough and thick enough and or the shell was weak or sensitive enough may not start to deform and then the rest of the shell would just pile in behind the nose with nowhere to go crushing the whole thing down in a rather messy low order explosion on the outside of the armor there was also the small problem that at any substantial angle about 15 degrees or more the soft cap would just get torn off by the differential forces exerted on impact and the shell would then just break up a combination of these two factors would be the primary method of failure for many british shells in world war one especially at jutland however in 1906 these shells worked wonderfully largely thanks to the then expected combat ranges of about six to ten thousand yards not usually involving angles of drop much in excess of 15 degrees or so and often somewhat less than that higher quality steel and better fuses meant that by 1909 when trials of the new 13.5 inch gun were about to be undertaken the new designed armor-piercing cap shells were entirely filled with high explosive instead of gunpowder the big choice for the royal navy was whether to use lidite again or tnt as the germans were reported to be thinking of doing tnt was seen as a marginally less powerful explosive despite being significantly more stable but the fact that it needed a different and more advanced kinds of fuse to safely operate and the germans who had led in that particular field of technology in the 1900s had suddenly gone all secretive the year before meant that lydite would be used some think which would come back to haunt the royal navy almost as much as their use of cordite propellant before the upcoming war was over this was followed in 1907 by the development of the cpc or common point capped shell this basically took the base fused common shell and slapped the armor-piercing cap on it giving the shell something of the penetration of an armor-piercing cap shell but with almost the bursting charge of a common or what could now probably be called a high explosive shell this it was hoped would allow penetration anywhere except to the main belt and turrets of a ship and upon penetration the absolutely huge charge several hundred pounds of high explosive would tear the enemy apart rapidly and violently in 1910 trials at newly revised estimated battle ranges longer than before and thus involving a greater angle of impact began to show problems with the new apc shells breaking up still based ashore jelico asked for this design flaw to be rectified and indeed two companies hatfields and firth developed new harder armor-piercing caps that resolved most of these issues but by the time these new shells went to trial firings angelico had been moved on to a sea-based command and the project stalled out thus at least in the royal navy the official response to the issue with the armor-piercing cap shell was to try firing common and cpc shells at an enemy at long range hoping to wreck their upper works fire control systems and command structures shima style and then use the apc when the range had closed and the angle of fall reduced this policy had changed again by 1914 switching back to just using apc against large armored targets which shows just how quickly everything was developing in the world of naval shells in the 1900s and 1910s the start of world war one itself brought about a number of changes at least in the royal navy a decision was made to start a switch to tnt filled shells but the huge levels of demand on the western front for any and all kinds of artillery ammunition left the navy with something of a delay meanwhile evidence from the battle of heligal and bite or at least the first one the battle of auckland islands and the gallipoli landings all showed deep flaws in the british shells gunpowder fillers were used did relatively little and lidite shells appeared to either just pass straight through the ships before detonating or else only partially detonated which indicated that the shells had begun to break up or the fuses were faulty or both thus whilst admiral sturdy did manage to wipe out von schpe's squadron at the battle of the falkland islands it took him the better part of three hours to put the stubborn german armored cruisers down this coupled with mishandling of cordite resulted in the overall disappointing effects of british gunnery at jutland although of the five major elements involved in the battle the grand fleet fifth battle squadron battle cruiser fleet high seas fleet and first scouting group the british actually occupied the top two spots as well as the battle cruiser fleet taking the bottom spot when it came for to gunnery accuracy but the effect of the shells was much reduced from what was expected sheer size of shells and the number of hits had made some difference and the closer range encounters proved quite effective such as invincible versus lutzel albeit that happened in both directions but with half a dozen or more capital ship kills effectively stolen from the royal navy by poorly functioning shells at longer ranges there was at last enough drive to resurrect jelico's old program of revised shell designs in many ways this was mostly a catch-up with some other navies such as the germans who had made similar advances around the time that jelica had been asking for them in the royal navy in the early 1910s internal politics within the royal navy didn't help as the man who was appointed to investigate the issue at first had previously been the chief inspector of naval ordnance and thus was unlikely to completely tear apart his own previous work but with jelico promoted to first sea lord and in at least this matter with the sport of beatty they were able to press down hard at getting the issue resolved eventually working to get jelico's flag captain dreyer appointed as chief of naval ordnance and the real work got underway in developing a new shell which was helped by some inert examples supplied usefully by the high seas fleet in their bombardment of british towns which showed some of the bigger advances that the germans had made whilst the start of war desire to switch over to tnt filling was still there the demands of the western front made this impossible and so a new formula shellite was devised which was something of a halfway house along with the adoption of the new armor-piercing caps that had been developed but not taken up pre-war the beleated move over to the hard steel armor-piercing cap and a new fuse based partially on recovered german examples was complete by 1918 the new green boy shells so named for their fetching new paint scheme were ready for deployment to the fleet just in time for the war to end anyway although had the high seas fleet sailed out on one last mission in late 1918 as ordered the grand fleet that would have awaited them would have been using the new shell now that all the major navies were on roughly the same page a bit of discussion about the properties of the hard armor-piercing cap so this is physics three of three compared with the softer caps the hard cap doesn't squash and warp anywhere near as much if at all which in turn means that although subject to the same near explosive shock effect they don't tend to break off at more extreme angles like the softer ones do this alone addresses many of the issues with the soft cap ap shells additionally due to being about as hard or harder than the face of the armor that they were up against the cap can start the work of boring through the armor plate before the shell itself comes into contact effectively making a kind of pilot hole for the shell to follow up on and significantly helping it stay on course especially at greater angles this of course means that any penetration done by the cap doesn't have to be repeated by the shell which thus effectively thins the plate that the shell has to get through this is of course proportional to how much armor-piercing cap there actually is and so this kind of shell as seen in the interwar and world war ii periods tends to have a much larger cap than most world war one and pre-world war one apc shells advances in the thickness and shape of armor-piercing caps would continue to be made leading to various revisions in shell types from the late 1910s onwards but they all use the same basic technology and approach this leaves two major items and one shell type to discuss firstly the us discovered that you could make the entire cap out of extremely hard steel for even more preemptive armor breaking as long as your shell was strong enough to survive the more instantly transmitted impact shock waves thankfully for them the midvale company had been on a mission to make a so-called unbreakable shell so they had one strong enough for the job which in large part accounts for the excellent armor-piercing characteristics of later u.s shells it remains something of a pity at least in my personal view that the united states went off on something of what i consider to be the wrong tangent with super heavy battleship shells since a more standard weight shell coupled with the power of the 16-inch 50 caliber mark 7 gun would have made for some truly hilarious armor-piercing values at the more practical battle ranges of world war ii secondly a number of navies investigated and in the italians case attempted to implement a so-called d-capping layer to try and deal with the new properties of these incoming shells this works on the principle that the cap can only be loosely attached usually by solder to the shell as this keeps the cap in place during flight and impact but it shears fairly easily from the shell itself when subjected to extreme force thus allowing the shell to continue and ensuring that the shattering of the cap doesn't transmit to the shell itself if the armor that is hit is thick enough to exert that kind of force however the weakness of this joint means that if the shell hits even a relatively thin piece of armor the cap will be dislodged now normally this isn't an issue the shell will punch through the cap falls away but the shells already inside the ship and it explodes so who cares but if you have a thin armor plate mounted ahead of the main armor plate you can in theory make the shell lose its cap before it hits the main armor plate as the cap detaches then only the shell itself hits and it's thus far more likely to shatter on impact with even a mildly thick piece of armor in theory as long as you're willing to take the hit on internal volume reduction this allows you to save overall weight and make your ship protected against much larger shells than you could with just a solid plate the issue is that the thickness of the decapping plate is related to the size of the shell via a number of different formula exactly which one you need depends on which nation's experiments you look at so a plate that would decap a 12-inch shell is likely to be completely useless against a 16-inch shell indeed worse than useless because that 16-inch shell is now on its merry way towards your thinner inner belt the second issue is that the shell needs space between the decapping plate and the main plate in order for the cap to actually fall off too little space and the cap won't have come off yet and all the effort is wasted the shell punches through but of course extra space means less internal volume within the hull itself and thus a less capable ship for any given set of dimensions the distance that is needed is also proportional to shell size so again a gap that might allow a smaller shell to drop its cap doesn't actually do much for a larger shell now you can of course try to reduce the size of this gap as the italians did by filling it with some inert material that's denser than air thus increasing the drag on the cap but less dense than steel the balance is found in not adding so much weight that you'd actually just have been better off going for one much thicker slab of steel instead armor-piercing shells don't really have any defense against a successfully designed d-capping system since if you make the join between the cap and the shell stronger it means the shell is more likely to be affected by the forces exerted on the cap making it more likely to break thus making it somewhat pointless to have the cap in the first place really the only thing you can do is just build an even bigger gun to overcome the plate and gap thicknesses that the armor has been designed for but only one ship was built with this system in mind that being the littorios and this armor system was never actually tested by a battle strike there are some questions over if the scheme was effective or if it was if it was efficient but as a result they still remain theoretical questions and finally we must make a brief mention of the semi-armor-piercing shell this is most commonly found at intermediate calibers less so at battleship grade calibers but still this is in some ways akin to a cpc shell the common pointed capped ones but rather than being a common or at this point with the advent of high explosive fillers at nhg shell that simply has an ap cap stuck on it the semi armor-piercing shell starts out with the armor-piercing design and simply ups the explosive content a bit nowhere near the amount that a cpc shell does but in exchange the semi armor-piercing shell retains much more of the baseline apc shells penetration than a cpc shell gains by having a cap slapped over what is effectively a flying container explosive and a semi armor-piercing shell still carries a bursting charge significantly larger than the average armor-piercing shell and that in turn means more damage these shells would prove to be mostly promising in the era of the treaty cruiser where due to the various restrictions placed on cruiser displacement and armament by the naval treaties it was entirely possible to have a gun at six or eight inch caliber whose armor-piercing properties might actually be way way way too much for taking on a similar sized vessel and thus a semi-armor-piercing shell in some circumstances would actually be better because you'd penetrate the armor anyway and then you'd have much more explosive behind the enemy's protection and of course the larger explosive charge would mean when you're using the shell against something like a destroyer which doesn't really have any armor protection to speak of you would [ __ ] it a lot quicker but anyway that concludes our whistle stop tour of the overarching developments of the more common types of naval artillery shell i hope you found it interesting and at some point we might talk about some of the more specialized shells such as shrapnel bombardment shells the type 3 japanese anti-aircraft shell and so on and so forth but the main aim was in this particular video to cover the basics of the changes in armor-piercing capability in ships in the period that we most commonly talk about so thank you very much for listening but since we're talking about overly sensitive shells that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 283,408

Rating: 4.936954 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Jellicoe, naval shells, naval artillery, Palliser shot, APC shell, cannonball

Id: 2lxFFPOv0kE

Length: 47min 46sec (2866 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AyAyAyBamba_462]

Drachinifel is great.

[u/KosherNazi]

wow, this is a really excellent overview, nicely done

[u/Kardinal]

I love the title. And great video. Thanks!

Also, how the heck was I not subscribed to Drachinifel already? I fixed that.