To me, it looks like the IM has better armor than the Poltava, but the latter ship has a much better ammo layout (there are no above-the-waterline magazines like on the IM) and is faster. What do you all think?
WWII saw the defeat of some of the greatest surface combatants known to man. Names like Yamato, Bismark, and Tirpitz have been forever etched into the history books of naval historians. Their sinkings, however, called for massive concentrations of firepower. To sink the Bismark, a single ship, the Royal Navy committed no less then 60 ships to its destruction. Of these ships the Royal Navy committed included 4 battleships, 3 battle cruisers, and at least 1 aircraft carrier. Nearly half of all the Royal Navy's capital ships were committed to the destruction of the one ship.
Similarly, the Yamato and the Tirpitz were highly resilient absorbing successive hits from bombs and torpedoes before sinking. The battleship, even with the technological limitations of armor plate at the time, still showed itself as a highly resilient platform. Furthermore, the firepower of the Iowa Class's 16-inch guns was instrumental in the Pacific in supporting Marines in ground combat operations.
Modern armor has advanced greatly since WWII. The advent of Chobham armor has seen at least a 5-fold increase in plate strength. A modern battleship with this amor could theoretically achieve Yamato levels of protection with light cruiser thicknesses of plate. With plating as thick as the Yamato, the protection afforded would be unprecedented.
Furthermore, a battleship has more firepower, more sustained firepower, and more responsive firepower than a carrier β and the battleshipβs firepower canβt be jammed, decoyed, shot down, or have a pilot captured.
The firepower provided by large caliber naval guns was also shown to be highly effective even as late as the 1982 Falklands War. This was an era in which anti-ship missiles were had by both sides.
We all wondered how many people fit in a 40k battleship, well, I calculated an estimation.
Disclaimer: this calculation was done for fun, and is not to be taken too seriously. Many rounding up/down and corner curving with unattainable information were made to give a proper number. Criticism is welcome.
So I was listening to Luetinβs video about Navigatiors when he said the biggest Imperial ships reach 8 kilometers length and contained milllions of people, but I wondered how many people? Letβs get to work.
see attached link for photo and numbers
https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/rh2nmt/calculating_the_population_of_a_retribution_class/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
First I took the info of a one of the largest battleships to be 8km length, this was confirmed by the wiki to be the length of a Retribution class battleship. I then put an image of it on a grid to find its height, 3.07 km, and estimated its width based on the 3D models I found and itβs appearance. Next I needed to find something comparable population wise, New York City seemed like the perfect fit. I found its land size, population number and population density in Wikipedia. Next i looked around for the average height of an NYC building. This would allow me to get the population density per volume. From here I had two ways to calculate the ship population.
- I assembled it into floors, found the population size per floor and then found the population size for all of it.
- I just used the population density per volume derived from NYC and used it for the ship volume.
Now some of you may think, but what about Central Park? Well I assumed a huge ship would have at least a few grand open spaces such as gathering halls and cargo storage so I left it in there. In addition, as you can tell the ship is not a box, so I estimated it to be about a third of the actual volume of the box containing it.
In conclusion, after the calculations stated and the linked photo.
A Retribution class battle ship has approximately 4.7 million people on board.
Edit: population as in max capacity
