Q&A · 58:45-59:18

How capital ships retained reserve buoyancy

Capital-ship survivability normally required the intact armored citadel to retain enough buoyancy to keep the hull afloat.

Question

How much reserve buoyancy did battleships and battlecruisers usually have?

Short answer

The usual standard was for the intact armored citadel to provide sufficient buoyancy; a half-citadel standard was exceptionally demanding.

Notes

The armored citadel was the central design criterion for capital-ship reserve buoyancy. As long as that protected volume remained intact, it needed to provide enough buoyancy to keep the vessel afloat. A stricter standard based on retaining only half the citadel is mentioned as a design aspiration. The required subdivision and volume would probably make that standard impractical.