Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "HMS Monmouth - Guide 304" video.
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How did navies combat metal fatigue in warship armor, hull plating, structural beams and girders, etc. (assuming that they were even aware of the potential for problems in this regard)? Fatigue cracking could have catastrophic consequences on a warship (fatigue damage to armor plating could allow the armor to be penetrated by weaponry that it would be absolutely immune to in its undamaged state [which could potentially raise a lot of questions regarding who sank or damaged what in various battles, given that, if the recipient ship's armor was weakened by metal fatigue, this could potentially allow the fatal or damaging blow to have been struck by a ship whose fire theoretically shouldn't've been capable of defeating said armor, either at a certain range and angle or even at all¹]; fatigue damage to hull plating could weaken it enough for things like grounding, collisions, or mine or torpedo explosions to result in a far more extensive hull breach, with attendant massive flooding, than would otherwise occur, or, alternatively, result in seemingly-spontaneous hull breaches occurring without warning; fatigue damage to major structural elements could result in the ship suffering seemingly-inexplicable structural failures in a heavy sea or from the shock of heavy gunfire, or, if sufficiently severe, in the ship unexpectedly breaking apart either when under way or at anchor), undetectable imperfections (such as microscopic inclusions or bubbles) in the manufacture of ships' steel structural and armor components could serve as crack-initiation points, the flexing and pounding encountered by any warship under way would subject the structure and armor to stress cycling with a period of mere seconds over a duration adding up to many years for most warships, and it seems like it would be practically impossible to detect fatigue cracking by visual inspection alone (by means of comparison, visual fatigue-crack inspection of aircraft not-uncommonly misses potentially-hazardous cracks, and a large warship has several orders of magnitude more metal potentially subject to fatigue cracking than even the largest aircraft), while the various methods of nondestructive inspection for detecting fatigue cracks seem to by and large postdate (often by many decades) the era covered by this channel.
¹: Thinking about it, this seems like it'd potentially've been capable of being a possible factor in the loss of HMS Hood; Hood was an old ship, with the potential for her armor to've been weakened by two-decades-plus's worth of fatigue damage, which, if this were the case, could've allowed a shell from Bismarck or even possibly Prinz Eugen to simply punch straight through the armor belt that should've stopped it cold and then go on to detonate the ship's magazines. (Disclaimer: this is NOT, in any way, shape, or form, intended as criticism of your analysis of Hood's sinking. I'm simply curious about something that seems, at first glance, like a potential second plausible explanation for why Hood blew up.)
And apologies for the wall of text; this question ended up being far longer than I'd expected it to be!
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