Comments by "Frank DeMaris" (@kemarisite) on "The Drydock - Episode 135" video.

Note that Kirishima's damage control officer described a total of twenty 16" hits from Washington. Some of these were close together and, if from the same salvo, would appear to Washington be a single hit, while others were below the waterline and would appear to Washington to have fallen short. Literally (literally, Mr. President!) nothing would have shrugged off those hits below the belt armor, and according to Robert Lundgren's article on navweaps.com there were about seven 16" hits below the waterline.
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@TheKingofbrooklin it may simply be a philosophical issue. The point of all or nothing armor is to preserve the ship, ensuring that the maximum amount of armor is protecting the vital reserve buoyancy and magazine/machinery spaces. However, it does mean that large areas of the ship are completely unprotected and any crew in those areas are unprotected, and I've seen a number of comments lamenting the fate of those unprotected crewmen on a ship with 12-14" of armor and nothing but the 1" shell plate protecting their own skins. The simple fact is that a distributed armor scheme will either weigh a lot more than an AoN scheme for the same thickness of belt and turret armor, or it will have thinner belt and turret armor to compensate for the additional armor weight elsewhere. In order to say that one is "better" than the other, one first has to decide what standard one is applying. If, as here, we talk about the efficiency of the design, then a distributed schemewill, by definition, be less efficient because it will either have thinner armor over the vitals or weigh more with the same maximum armor. One could define another standard by which to evaluate the armor scheme, and the distributed scheme might be "better" than AoN by that standard, but the standard would have to be clearly defined and then one would have to come up with a way to evaluate it. Maybe it eventually turns out that a distributed armor scheme leads to fewer casualties among the crew when the ship is damaged but not sunk (and crew survivability is the standard chosen for evalustion), but one would have to do a lot of resesrch and analysis to make that argument and the data pool may simply be too small to strongly support a conclusion.
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@Aubury it's been done within the last 4-5 drydocks.
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@Dave-sy3rg "Dis calls for a REAL superhero!"
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@geoffbarney5914 it's the way the poster I was responding to was referring to it, so I simply matched his terminology (I believe). Further, there has been a lot of research that shows a single thick layer is more effective at resisting shell/bomb penetration than multiple thin layers of the same total thickness.
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@shaunsalter450 for this kind of gun its common to just make your normal HE round with a tracer element in the base, as opposed to machineguns that have a 1 per 5 (or whatever) mix of ball and tracer rounds.
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@geoffbarney5914 what "theoretical advantages of the design decisions" were borne out in practice?
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@geoffbarney5914 while I might have missed a comment, I've understood Drach to be saying that the Bismark is an inefficient design in terms of how much ship you get for displacement. In other words, it is only competitive against smaller battleships of about the same age, or it is at a significant disadvantage against a ship of comparable displacement. Those points either don't really do much about efficiency for the Bismarks, or in the case of the torpedo defense system actually emphasizes the inefficiency (550 lb vs 700 lb vs 1,000 lb).
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