[ikalugin]

Some points:

- not the entirety of the Iowa class has been armoured to the same standard.
Iowa without the front/aft areas of hull or superstructure may still float but it would be mission killed.

- the armoured citadel has been desighned to protect inside a narrow safe area.
This was done because protecting that fast BB against it's own guns at all ranges was not feasable.

- this safe area is defined by munition's velocity and angle of fall.
That is because those are functions of engagement range.

- it is not hard to modify AShMs' angle of fall or to attack the weakpoints.
This means that you can bypass Iowa's protection and that is without going nuclear.

However with heavy AShMs you dont need to do that, because at their speeds (600m/s+) and mass (500kgs+) they would penetrate Iowa's belt in horizontal flight, so you don't need, say, go into a speed dive to plunge through the deck armour even if it is the standard flight trajectory (ie for the Kh22N).


So, in my opinion, modern BBs are dumb. The last gun orientated warship US has built - Zumwalt was born as a white elephant.