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RTW 3 has probably the most true to life damage model when it comes to naval games, but even it has flaws. More specifically the overly large vulnerability of BE armor across all the different armor schemes. Extended armor hides quite the amount of crits behind them, salt water in the machinery, electric power being disabled, engine room hits even when not using narrow belt, a significant source of flooding and of course the steering gear or rudder, but I'll get to that in the end.

So with so many critical's behind BE one starts to look at all the 1890 predreadnought templates with 0 extended armor and starts to see the issue. The 40+ battleships of the British Empire sure looks threatening until one realize that you can cripple each and every single one of them with mass 3" HE fire. Wreaking machinery, jamming rudders and turning off the lights the humble anti-torpedo boat weapon will do it all and more as primitive damage control will cause significant amounts of flooding.

This is quite frankly ridiculous, predreadnoughts always had armor protecting vulnerable pieces of machinery extending outside of the citadel. No one in their right mind will think a torpedo boat with its 3" gun can cause havoc in a battleships innards by just shooting around the main armor belt. Of course, the simple fix here is to simply change the template to armor their extended bits to a minimum of 2" or 3". But we can see here on just the ridiculous amount of damage can be sourced from BE hits.

Now, looking past the predreadnoughts extended armor still becomes a source of headaches in the early dreadnought era and afterwards. Traditional practice is to armor the main belt against battleship calibers and the extended armor against secondary fire, for an example 13" B and a 4" BE. Unfortunately no one told the heavy caliber shells that they're supposed to hit the main armor belt so you'll have capital units falling out of line from machinery crits, spinning in circles from a rudder hit and just simply sinking even if the main armor hasn't been quite often as hit. Quite frankly the main armor can't compete with it's extended counterpart when it comes to protecting the ships vitals!

So players found a solution to the problem, the Uniform Narrow Sloped Deck armor scheme. Basically, set armor coverage to narrow and armor both B and BE to the same exact thickness against battleships shells, ie 13" belt 13" BE. Now its almost impossible to have your ships fall out of line while your enemy suffers crippling machinery and steering gear strikes. In fact, BE under narrow appears to get hit about the same amount and protects even more critical areas then it does under normal, without apparently protecting any less of the waterline.

This post is getting a bit long so I'm gonna skip to talk about the steering gear. RTW does a poor job representing the lengths nations went to in protecting the steering gear. Iowa, for an example, has an 18" armor plate specifically to protect the rudder mechanisms and she is not alone of having it thicker than the main armor belt. A light cruiser with advanced AP technology can shoot out the rudder of your 50k ton battleship. Quite silly, so the best way to represent steering gear armor is to have it be Belt + Belt extended when rolled for a hit.

And that's it, I hope to start more discussion in regards to BE armor and it's overly significant role in regards to ship protection. There is of course more to add here but in the interest of preventing a wall of text i'll end it here.

Great idea about the narrow belt. I've been making BE the same or nearly the same as belt for a long time for capital ships.

well, its look like that there is need to look at how belt armor is coded in the game. its look like that be armor is more important than b armor.

No BE armour is, however, historically accurate for British ships of around 1890 - they were using an early form of AON (the bows and stern were packed with cork to reduce loss of buoyancy).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Sov ... battleship

Tankaxe raises good points and I generally agree, I was actually planning to make my own post about this issue at some point but Tankaxe beat me to it! The narrow belt thing in particular feels broken to me.

WLRoo is right to point out Royal Sovereign had no belt armour extending past the main battery barbettes (and the design was far from unique in this respect). But, at the same time, Royal Sovereign's steering gear and shafts and so on were still protected - she had a low, below the waterline, 3" deck covering them. Considering 1890s battle ranges, a 3" deck like that is very substantial protection. Steering gear could still be damaged by shock or by diving shells of course, but belt armour wouldn't protect against such hits either.
The problem for the games protection model is that low deck approach to steering gear protection is impossible to replicate. If you want to build Royal Soveriegn you either have to leave BE off and hugely over expose the ship to the litany of critical hits that are covered by BE armour, or you put heavy BE on and end up massively exaggerating the level of waterline protection for the ends of the ship.

Low armour decks were a pretty common approach for protecting steering gear right up until people stopped building armoured warships - Vanguard (1944) takes the same approach!

I don't thing there's anything wrong with assuming 'box' style protection for steering gear and the other BE criticals, but there will be friction resulting from that assumption so long as the side protection of the steering gear box and the bow waterline are defined by a single value.


On a related note, DE armour currently protects the top of the secondary battery in addition to everything else it allready does. That feels like a bit of a kludge and it's not intuitive. I think it would be better if (so long as it does not have it's own player entered value) the secondary battery top armour was some function of it's vertical armour. Perhaps something like ST=S up to to 2" or ST=0.3*S whichever is greater for example.

This is an example on the ridiculous invulnerability of BE armor. An All or Nothing armor scheme ship and somehow a shell striking the BE was able to pierce through and hit the engine room. Now, as anyone who knows how a AoN armor scheme works one would very confused on such a shell will find it's way to a ships innards by striking armor only meant to protect the steering gear and other extremities.

I was playing around with only using 8" BE on my AoN capitals to see the results on the campaign. As you can see, if I uniformed the BE with the belt armor my ship wouldn't have had to suffer such a crit. Frustrating as it is annoying.

It is somewhat awkward, but can be explained by a shell hitting in the area normally protected by BE, but at a sufficient angle that it's path took it through the engine space.

Worth keeping an eye on, of course. It should be extremely rare, but if it isn't it needs checking.