Quote:
Originally Posted by lwd
Depends a lot on the distance or actually on the decent angle of the shell. At 45 degrees its as wide as the ship is deep at lower angles it's wider. Note that said shells are still designed to be effective if they hit head on, although as noted there is something of a decrease in effectiveness. A shell that can penetrated a battlships belt armor isn't going to be effected too much by the TDS or bulges. A further note is that once the angle of decent gets low enough the shell may skip rather than "dive" so the band dissapears at that point.
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On the
Yamato there was a deliberate attempt to minimize the diving shell threat in the torpedo defense system. This was done by carrying the belt down to the double bottom of the ship and slanting it inward to create a fairly deep defense system. The Japanese erred in leaving this space void instead of liquid loaded however. With the
Bismarck because the ship has a fairly wide beam the torpedo defense system is quite deep and there is an internal bulkhead at the back of the system that is fairly substancial. The Germans also have their system liquid loaded.
In both ships the system used is sufficently deep that most diving shells should fail to penetrate the defense system. In the
Prince of Wales' case the one hit on her by
Bismarck below the waterline failed to penetrate her relatively shallow defense system and instead caused flooding in the torpedo defense system itself.
The main reason the shells lack a large amount of penetration is simply that their velocity decreases extremely rapidly upon entering the water. Even following a reliable underwater trajectory, the
Yamato's shells will not travel all that far after entering the water and will lack the penetrative power of an above waterline hit.