>I don't know how to break this to you, but both the USN and the IJN planned against underwater hits.
Not in a fashion which would have stopped the penetration suffered by PoW.
You're right, the RN was no longer at the top of the game in WW2. However this isn't some case of some teeaboo mumbling "RN stronk" like you seem to think. This is a case of you being unable to comprehend that the hit on PoW was a fluke hit which would have penetrated ANY battleship then afloat.
So very little as to not really be for functional purposes.
It's not about a fluke hit. Yes, the fuze malfunctioned, and it waws a 1 in a 100 chance to havea shell dive into teh double bottom that way.
That shell might've come in a few centimeters higher and opened a hole into a turbine room.
Or it might've gone a few centimeters lower and sunk without ever hitting anything.
It's about some people sperging about how 'happy' the RN must've been about the fact that their ship got hit in that way. Nobody is ever happy about that, because even such a fluke hit can cripple a ship.
There is not a lot you can do to protect against hits against exposed things like rudders, screws or shafts.
But you CAN protect machinery spaces and magazines against underwater hits, even fluke ones.
RN and KM didn't do it, but that only shows that they (for different reasons, of course) did not use the interwar years for R&D.
>It's not about a fluke hit.
>it waws a 1 in a 100 chance
Herpity derpity doo
...
>1 in 100 chance
>hundreds of rounds of ammunition being fired
Sounds more like an inevitability when you put it that way.
>Sounds more like an inevitability when you put it that way.
No, it doesn't. You're ignoring, most likely deliberately, the fact that not all of those "hundreds of rounds" are "eligible" for "diving" hits.
A successful diving hit needs to:
- Land within a certain distance of the hull
- Have a "flight path" which intersects the hull
- Not hit the ship
When you're honest enough to examine all the aspects of "diving" hits, you realize it's not a case of 1 in 100. It's not even a case of 1 in 1000. Such hits are called flukes for a reason.
...
The fact that the IJN decided to invest a ton of ressources into designing shells that did this and defenses against this makes me question your outright dismissal of diving hits.
The irony is that a KM ship hit a RN ship with a diving hit, while both of these organizations treated the whole issue like you.
The double irony is that this only happened becasue the shell in question had a shitty fuze (though one could make a reasonable argument that the fuze was fine and only failed because the shell hit water and probably tumbled for a few revolutions)
One really has to wonder why they didn't add a gun shield of ome sort.