User talk:2601:196:181:BE00:955A:D2ED:3734:B115

Barbette armor

Clearly, you don't know what you're talking about. In a nutshell, barbettes during the period in question were heavily armored tubes that supported the turrets; their sides typically had very heavy armor above the armor deck, and thinner plating below. As a weight saving measure, they would sometimes have reduced thickness on the sides that faced "inward" (i.e., the rear section of a turret forward, the inboard side of wing turrets, etc.). Please stop adding the clarification tag; that you don't understand something doesn't mean it's wrong. Parsecboy (talk) 14:02, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

@Parsecboy:

First, User:Parsecboy, save your spleen and mind your manners a bit tighter than you are: You are an administrator and you are skirting violating WP:Civility both in your tone here and your language. If it is your intent to educate you can do so in a more collegial manner; if it is to chastise you'd better reconsider.

Your take on this is all news to me - and this subject is not a new one to me at all. A barbette of that era was to my understanding a stout metal cylinder that supported a differentially armored turret. I had never in my life seen anywhere that such structures were specifically armored in any fashion beyond that at the time, let alone differentially armored, as you describe. The historical transition was from big naval guns being mounted in the original iteration of heavily armored barbettes into being mounted in armored turrets atop modern cylindrical barbettes ("supports" which, in their inherent stoutness, also served as citadels of sorts for ammunition handling for some distance below the guns)

From the Wikipedia article on barbette:

In the late 1880s, the debate between barbette or turret mounts was finally settled. The Royal Sovereign class, mounted their guns in barbettes, but the follow-on design, the Majestic class, adopted a new mounting that combined the benefits of both kinds of mounts. A heavily armoured, rotating gun house was added to the revolving platform, which kept the guns and their crews protected. The gun house was smaller and lighter than the old-style turrets, which still permitted placement higher in the ship and the corresponding benefits to stability and seakeeping. This innovation gradually became known simply as a turret, though the armored tube that held the turret substructure, which included the shell and propellant handling rooms and the ammunition hoists, was still referred to as a barbette. These ships were the prototype of the so-called pre-dreadnought battleships, which proved to be broadly influential in all major navies over the next fifteen years.[22][23]

And its accompanying image of a slightly later than Utah era battleship's barbettes during construction:

USS Maryland under construction in 1917, showing the forward two barbettes without the gun turrets installed

It was always my impression - as that is what anything I had ever read appeared to convey - that the barbette cylinder was merely built stoutly, very stoutly, to perform its very demanding function of supporting the weight of extremely heavy naval rifles, their firing (at very torque-inducing angles), and the heavy subsequent recoil. Nowhere did I ever read that it was also further reinforced by specific armor, let alone added differentially by exposure, which we both understand to be the addition of supplemental plates (often of a special alloy steel, at least as the 20th century went on) similar (in an application we will have no dispute over) to the supplementary armor belt added directly to a warship's structural hull plating around key parts of the vessel more or less straddling the waterline and below. This type and technique of "supplementary plating" being in contrast to either all-in-one castings (as in some smaller turrets, including many tanks) or the basically "unitary" construction of post-Majestic "gun houses" (being effectively *made* of armor, rather than being separate structures having their own integrity subsequently clad in it).

It is not clear to me when what I have described above (based on what I understood to have been the case) transitioned into a more complex and refined arrangement as on the Mark VII guns the US' latter WWII battleships were fitted with, which can be viewed here in an exploded diagram:

Please note in particular the labels "Barbette" and "Turret foundation (stationary)" on the lower left, and what their arrows point to. By this point there were two completely separate structures, what was originally the load-bearing "barbette" (there referred to as a "turret foundation") and some distance outward of it a superstructure of armor (there referred to simply as the "barbette").

There is no evidence in the above image of such a two-part construction technique being employed in the larger, more modern 16-inch/45-caliber guns being installed in Maryland laid down eight years after Utah. If it followed later during construction on either vessel than I am learning something new.

Evidently the matter of semantics has been at the root of this misunderstanding, as both the cylindrical barbette "proper" and any additional structure build outside of it (labeled a "barbette" in the Mark-7 diagram) have historically been referred to as the "barbette". What the passage I had contested is referring to, ultimately, is a "citadel" of sorts of armor protecting the historic barbette, as can clearly be seen in this image of a damaged superfiring 12-inch/45-caliber Mark 5 gun gun as used on the Utah:

Regardless whether this is a separate band of differential armor or it was clad to a former unitary barbette, it is the armor at issue in the contested passage, the misunderstanding is cleared up, and I happily drop the issue. An education on this matter rather than a remonstration would have been preferable. An education that can still be of value explaining how deeply any such differential armor would go below deck level, particularly insofar as semantics certainly still tend to get squishy as to what exactly the "barbette" is and how far that terminology applies as one goes down. In the diagram, for example, the "barbette" ends just below its arrow, yet what was traditionally regarded as it, and is still referred to colloquially, goes as far as the supporting cylinder (today's "turret foundation") extends, down to powder handling level(s). Yours, 2601:196:181:BE00:955A:D2ED:3734:B115 (talk) 16:20, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Calling you ignorant of basic facts is not uncivil if you are ignorant of said facts. Again, that you have never seen reference to this is not proof of anything, apart from perhaps that you are not the expert you think you are. It was very common practice. See République-class_battleship#Armor. Or this line from "German dreadnoughts and their protection", an article by NJM Campbell: "The barbette armour [of the Nassau class] had an internal diameter of 25 ft 7 in...the thickness above the forecastle deck was 10-8 in except that the most exposed part of the forward barbette was 11 in. On the outer side of the main bulkheads [i.e., the fore and aft sides of the centerline turrets, respectively] the thick armour on the centerline barbettes was taken down to the armour deck, but when behind the battery and midships side armour they and the wing barbettes were drastically reduced to 3.2 in – 2 in."

Again, that you are not aware of this being a common practice does not mean that it wasn't. Parsecboy (talk) 16:51, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

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