Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "The Development of the North Carolina class - The Nelson that never was" video.

4:30 - Nobody having yet realized at this point that capital-ship-deck-armor penetration only really comes into play at ranges long enough for the enemy to see you firing and get out of the way.
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11:50 - Pity about anyone who's manning the secondary battery when B or C turret fires back along the length of the ship, though.
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@Ah01 Which would've been a complete nonissue if she'd be underway and able to evade. You don't need particularly-thick deck armor to stop bombs dropped from low enough to actually hit a maneuvering capital ship.
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@mitchelloates9406 TBF, VTEs are simply much more efficient than turbines. They just handle high speed poorly.
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@bkjeong4302 Even with the 16"/45 firing the superheavy shell, you still only get good deck penetration at ranges beyond effective battle range, at the cost of considerably-degraded belt-armor penetration at all ranges. They'd've been much better off sticking with a standard-mass shell and blowing through enemy belt armor like tissue paper.
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@Ah01 Exactly! Tirpitz demonstrates how a "fleet-in-being" approach doesn't really work if you can't maintain air superiority, and the travails of the two Scharnhorsts demonstrate why a heavy-repair base within easy range of enemy bombers is essentially worthless unless you can afford to cover it with enough fighters to keep away said bombers.
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I'm a bit surprised the extra weight of the turboelectric drive was a killer for it; wouldn't that've been more than made up for by the fuel weight saved by its ability to keep the turbines in their narrow power band at both battle and cruising speeds (whereas geared turbines, with their single gear ratio, have to accept being well outside the power band at cruising speed - where even a battleship spends the vast majority of its time - in order to give max performance at battle speed)?
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@grantmonsma3569 OK, true, but needing less fuel also means that you don't need as much space dedicated to fuel tanks, which saves weight both because the fuel tanks themselves can be smaller and because the smaller fuel tanks mean your machinery space is smaller (allowing you to shorten the citadel and reduce the amount of belt and deck armor you need to carry); additionally, the reduction in fuel weight means that the difference between standard and full displacement is smaller, which means the ship moves down less when it goes up to full load, which means you don't have to build the freeboard deck or the upper edge of the armor belt up quite as high to ensure that they remain a safe distance above the waterline at full load, which saves additional weight.
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According to the NavWeaps armor-penetration figures, the German 12"/50 gun used on the Helgolands, Kaisers, Königs, and Derfflingers seems to have hilariously overperformed, having considerably-greater armor penetration than the British 13.5"/45 Mk. V(H) despite the latter gun firing a shell over half again as massive (and thus both more-effective at a given impact speed and better-able to retain its speed in the face of aerodynamic drag). At a range of 10,000 yards, the British 13.5" gun's 1400-pound shell can penetrate 12.5 inches of Krupp cemented armor, whereas, at a range of 10,940 yards, the German 12" gun's 892.9-pound shell is listed as being able to penetrate 13.6 inches of Krupp cemented armor; although the German gun does have a 13%-higher muzzle velocity, the lower ballistic coefficient of its smaller shell should mean that it's lost this speed advantage by the time it makes it past 10,000 yards (and, even at closer ranges, that speed advantage has to fight against the disadvantage of the 12" shell being quite a lightweight compared to the 13.5" British shell). Why is the German 12"/50 overperforming to such a hilarious degree? Are the listed armor-penetration figures for the British gun using those early-war shells whose armor penetration was severely hamstrung by their tendency to detonate after penetrating only a small distance?
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@Ah01 And the defense for that is air cover, combined with radar and air and surface patrols to detect an enemy force long enough in advance to raise steam and get moving. Once an enemy force gets the drop on you at anchor, assuming they don't chicken out (looking at you, von Spee), you are very, very screwed, no matter whether it's a surface or air force.
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@drakeconsumerofsoulsandche4303 The part of the video my comment was directed at was concerning the effect of long-range plunging shellfire against deck armor; heavy armor-piercing bombs were very much an outside-context problem at that point.
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@jasonbrannock1698 Built-up v. wire-wound guns.
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@DavidVT23 I'm guessing that the insistence upon having at least x % of the length armored was in order to ensure that the armored citadel had sufficient reserve buoyancy to keep the ship afloat.
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@John.0z A torpedo battleship isn't necessarily a bad idea; it would've worked well for most of the predreadnought era (when battle ranges still didn't go beyond 1,000 yards or so), as well as for anyone who's developed fast, long-range oxygen torpedoes (when your torpedoes suddenly gain a massive range advantage over your main guns), especially given that the huge displacement savings from not needing heavy main guns or the turrets, barbettes, or magazines for same would've allowed a torpedo battleship's belt to be up-armored a lot, thus enabling it to safely close to a range well inside what's safe for a conventional gun-armed battleship before yeeting its torpedoes at the enemy battleline.
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