Hits Below Waterline

[iambecomelife]

I was wondering if hits below the waterline are modeled? I have read some accounts of WWII ships getting hit by shells that struck the surface of the water without exploding. Did any WWI - era shells have the ability to stay intact once they hit the water, or were the fuses too sensitive?

[Bullethead]

I was wondering if hits below the waterline are modeled? I have read some accounts of WWII ships getting hit by shells that struck the surface of the water without exploding. Did any WWI - era shells have the ability to stay intact once they hit the water, or were the fuses too sensitive?

Yup, the trajectory of shells underwater is modeled. It was that way in our 1st game and has carried over into Jutland. A shell can hit short, splash, travel underwater, and hit the ship, sometimes below the belt. It all depends on the angle of fall and the distance from the ship. Next time a ship capsizes, look at the belly shell holes :D

The most famous example of this happening in WW1 was a 13.5" shell from Iron Duke which was a "low blow" on Konig. This shell went under the belt, through the wing compartments and torpedo bulkehead, and exploded in a coal bunker just outboard of a 15cm magazine. The explosion blew all the coal into the magazine and several cartridges ignited from the flash, but the fire was immediatlely quenched by the incoming ocean. However, when the ship was being repaired and they were shoveling all the soggy coal out of the magazine, they found a 15cm shell under the pile whose fuze had been armed by all the trauma. IOW, Konig had come within an RCH of blowing up like Pommern, which is believed to have blown up from shells becoming armed and going off in a 2ndary battery magazine abreast the torpedo hit.

Even though Konig didn't blow up, this hit hurt. Because the shell got through the underwater protection system before exploding, flooding was worse than it would have been from a torpedo in the same place. This hit knocked out B turret and much of the 2ndary battery due to flooded magazines, plus flooded some engineering spaces, which reduced her speed.

This hit was very similar to that which the IJN noticed when they were shooting up the hulk of Tosa after the Washington Treaty. They were so impressed that they designed shells optimized for underwater trajectories, which they used in WW2. These shells therefore had rather wider parameters in which they could hit a ship underwater than those of other nations before or since. Normal shells could still do this (as in Bismarck vs. Prince of Wales), but it took a very special set of circumstances. The IJN shells still needed special circumstances, but not quite as special.

[CaptHawkeye]

IJN shells suffered from somewhat poor performance due to emphasis on underwater performance though. Which was ultimately the reason why Yamato's 18.1 inch shells didn't have characteristics much more impressive than Iowa's 2700LB "Super Heavy" shells.

This isn't to say it was a "bad" idea per se. It just wasn't perfect either.