page_title: Naval armour
section_title: Royal Navy
hierarchical_section_title: Naval armour / Composition / Ships / Royal Navy
caption_attribution_description: HMS RODNEY adds her weight of shells to the Navy's pounding of enemy positions along the Caen coast in support of the D-Day landings. Smoke is hanging over the starboard side (photograph taken from the frigate HMS HOLMES).
context_page_description: Naval armour refers to the various protections schemes employed by warships, and is distinguished from other kinds of armour. Naval sailing ships have had protection from weaponry since at least Ancient times, when Greek and Roman warships used simple cladding. As weapons evolved and became more destructive, naval armour became an important part of warships. Korean and European ships began to use some iron plating in the 1500s. The first ironclad warship was created in 1859, and the pace of armour advancement accelerated quickly thereafter. The emergence of battleships around the turn of the 20th century saw ships become increasingly large and well armoured. Vast quantities of heavily armoured ships were used during the World Wars, and were crucial in the outcome. The emergence of guided missiles in the last part of the 20th century has greatly reduced the utility of armor, and most modern warships are now only lightly armored.
  Naval armour consists of many different designs, depending on what the armour is meant to protect against.
context_section_description: Welded Ducol was used in HMS Nelson and HMS Rodney (1927), and may have contributed to initial structural damage when the big guns were fired. A solution was found by using rivets to attach the welded Ducol substructures to the hull rather than the original all-welded construction, allowing for some 'give'.
  It was used in British anti-torpedo-system design practice in its last battleships. The internal hull and torpedo bulkheads and internal decks were made of Ducol or "D"-class steel, an extra-strong form of HTS. According to Nathan Okun, the King George V-class battleships had the simplest armour arrangement of all post-WWI capital ships. "Most of the load-bearing portions of the ship were constructed of British Ducol ("D" or "D.1") extra-high-strength silicon-manganese high-tensile construction steel, including the weather deck and the bulkheads."
  HMS Ark Royal's fully-enclosed armoured hangar and the armoured flight deck which it supported were constructed of Ducol.
  Other types of armour used on Navy ships:
  HTS = High-tensile steel
  STS = Special treatment steel = homogenous armour
caption: Rodney bombarding German positions off the Caen coast, 7 June 1944
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