Dilandu wrote:Joat42 wrote:Is the yellow dots portholes? I wonder how far in the future they will start welding those shut because they are weakspots.
As I understood it most older ships had portholes because there where no forced ventilation and without those portholes it would become unbearable hot below deck (depending on the weather ofc).
No, the problem was simply a comfort. Crews, locked in the porthole-less metal box wouldn't be exactly happy about that.
Moders warships has less portholes as the anti-nuclear precaution, not because it somehow affect ther integrity.
Agreed, but with a couple of caveats.
Lack of ventilation did create significant habitability problems, which is one reason sailing warships spent so much time with wind scoops rigged to direct wind down into the interior of the ship, Powered ventilation did make a significant change in that respect.
More to the point, perhaps, one wartime discovery was that scuttles (portholes) increase flooding as a ship settles deeper into the water. As a result, you will see no scuttles lower than the "flooding deck" (I use that term for clarity avoiding a whole plethora of technical terminology), or the boundary deck which is supposed to keep the core compartments and vital systems unflooded and protect the ship's essential buoyancy even if other compartments higher in the ship flood.
One of the most telling comments on the thin armor of the last 2 WWI BCs of the British Grand Fleet (Respite and Renown) was that when they arrived at Scapa Flow "The scuttles in their hulls revealed the inadequacy of their single strake of thin armor to all the world."
It's also worth looking at the Russian (Hey, Dilandu!) Imperator Pavel class battelships laid down in 1903 or 1904 but heavily reworked post-Tushima. Some of the Russian ships lost there flooded through their scuttles as they took on water through other holes in the hull and settled deeper into the water. The Russians responded in Imperator Pavel and (I think) Andrei Pervoswani (sorry about the spelling, Dilandu; I'm shooting from memory here) by eliminating all scuttles from their hulls. And, IIRC, both ships enjoyed a reputation (deserved or not; I have no supporting documentation either way) for being unhealthy vessels because of that. It's worth noting, however, that IIRC, no last-generation USN battleship (all designed in the 1930s and 40s, well before the atomic bomb was more than a gleam in Enrico Fermi's eye) had portholes or scuttles in the hull at all. I may be wrong about that, but I don't think I am. If anyone has more ready access to his reference books than I do and can chime in to correct me if wrong, I'd appreciate it.
Their engineers was so worried about the effect, that HE shells may have on their unarmored parts, that they simply armored ALL battleship's hull instead. However, it was not a good idea, as it turned out that their impressive armour area was too thin to stop the heavy AP shells that became the main instrument of dreadnought's long-range warfare.
and, Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat.
