75 Sentences With "conning towers" | Random Sentence Generator

The ships' forward conning towers had 10–12 in sides and their aft conning towers had 3 in sides.

Captain Davis of and Admiral Lee fought 2nd Guadalcanal from the unarmoured bridges of their battleships. Musicant makes reference to South Dakota Bridge personnel observing the battle but remains silent on their use of the armoured conning tower. Soon the heavy battleship conning towers were removed from , , , and during their post-Pearl Harbor attack reconstructions and replaced with much lighter cruiser-style conning towers. By the end of World War II, US ships were designed with expanded weather bridges enclosing the armored conning towers.

Their conning towers had thick sides with thick roofs. The armored coamings for the funnel uptakes were 9 in thick.

Their forward conning towers were protected by on the sides and 80 mm on the roofs, while the rear conning towers had worth of armor on the sides. The main battery gun turrets had armored sides that were thick and roofs that were thick. The barbettes that held the turrets were armored with thick steel.

In order to operate in the Indian Ocean Monsoon the submarines were fitted with large conning towers and armed with two / 47 caliber guns. The large conning towers were rebuilt to a smaller German style as a result of war experience. Ammiraglio Cagni carried out a 4-1/2-month patrol in the South Atlantic during 1942–43. The other three boats were used as transport submarines to supply Italian forces in North Africa.

Not all sections of the ships received the Krupp steel; the casemate battery was protected with 6 in of Harvey steel on the fronts, and 2 in on the sides and the rears. Their forward conning towers received Harvey steel for their sides that were 12 in thick, while the aft conning towers had only sides.Burt, p. 178 The thinner armour layout of the ships came under intense criticism while they were being built, particularly in the press.

Their forward conning towers were armored with of steel plate on the sides. Their main battery turrets had 4 in thick faces and the supporting barbettes had thick steel. The secondary guns had thick gun shields.

Parkes, Oscar British Battleships, first published Seeley Service & Co, 1957, published United States Naval Institute Press, 1990. page 12-4. The wooden upper deck was thick. There were two conning towers protected by wrought iron plate.

These new conning towers were also placed much higher in the ship, for superior visibility.Raven and Roberts, British Battleships of WW2 There is no evidence that RN captains and admirals used the armoured conning towers on those ships that did have them during World War II, with, for example, Vice- Admiral Holland and Captain Kerr commanding Hood during the Battle of the Denmark Strait from her unarmoured bridge.Testimony of Ted Briggs Even in the United States Navy (USN), battleship captains and admirals preferred to use the unarmoured bridge positions during combat.

The conning towers also had walls of that thickness as well as roofs thick. The deck of the central armoured citadel had a thickness of and the lower deck was thick from the ends of the belt to the bow and stern.

In 1906–1907, new conning towers were installed aboard the submarines to rectify buoyancy issues. In 1910, the Kasatka class were rebuilt with new power plants. They received a diesel- electric system which included a diesel engine rated at . The displacement of the submarines increased to surfaced and submerged.

The sides of the turrets were thick and they had a roof. Their barbettes were also 10 inches thick, although this was reduced to five inches where they were screened behind other armour. The two conning towers' sides were in thickness with a roof. The decks ranged from in thickness.

The hull was constructed out of steel, with the ship equipped with a single funnel and two conning towers. Her main armament was three torpedo tubes. Two of them were located in torpedo rooms on both sides of the bows. The third one was on the truck which was located on the stern.

The ships were protected by a curved armored deck that was up to thick; the deck deck was flat over the longitudinal center and sloped down at the sides to connect to the outer hull plating. Their forward conning towers were armored with the same thickness of steel plate on the sides.

They did not have conning towers, which were added to the later boats for stability underwater. No.19 was launched by at Pearl Harbor. Most of the other fifty are unaccounted for, although three were captured in Sydney (Australia), and others in Guam, Guadalcanal, and Kiska Island, accounting for some of the other hull numbers.

Above the deck at the sides, a cofferdam filled with cellulose was intended to contain flooding from damage below the waterline. Below the main deck, a thin splinter deck covered the propulsion machinery spaces to protect them from shell fragments. Their forward conning towers had thick plating on the sides. The gun shields were thick.

Some boats that went through an early phase were then upgraded further in a later phase. A similar programme for the Royal Navy involved modifications to 24 wartime and post-war British T- and A-class submarines, which were provided with streamlined hulls, sail-type conning towers, and increased underwater performance during 1948-60.

The class retained the large and fully enclosed conning towers that were adopted for the preceding Delawares, as a result of American studies of the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. The design reduced the vulnerability of the command staff. Overall, these ships were much better protected than their British counterparts, although they were modified extensively during the interwar period.

Their forward conning towers were protected with thick sides and thick slopes. The gun turrets had thick roofs and curved sides varying in thickness between backed with thick teak; the thicker armor was located on the fronts of the turrets, where they would be more likely to suffer hits, while the sides and rears received thinner protection.

Of the foursubmarines, only twowere commissioned before the end of World War I: Lagrange and Romazzotti, which operated in the Mediterranean Sea. From 1922 to 1923, the ships underwent a major refit in which they received new major conning towers, bridges and periscopes. All ships served in the Mediterranean Sea until 1935 for Lagrange and 1937 for the other threeships.

Armor on her barbettes was between 10 and 12 inches. Conning towers were protected by 12 inches of armor, with 4 inches of armor on the tops. In all, the armor totaled on the upper casemate, on the lower casemate, along the belt, on the bulkheads, on the splinter deck, on the barbettes, and on the conning tower for a total protection of .

The ships were also armed with a pair of submerged 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes. The sloped armoured deck ranged in thickness from on the flat and slopes, respectively. The casemates were protected by 6 inches of Harvey armour while the gun shields had of armour. The conning towers were protected by walls and their roofs were 2 inches thick.

Raven and Roberts, British Battleships of WW2, p415: R&R; also state: "Another feature of interest is the retention of the heavily armoured conning towers in the American, French and German navies. These structures were of little use and added considerably to the top weight and weight of armour. That of the Bismarck certainly seems to have done little to protect her officers, communications and fire control arrangements, all of which suffered heavily in the early stages of her action with KGV and Rodney." The RN's analysis of World War I combat revealed that command personnel were unlikely to use an armoured conning tower, preferring the superior visibility of unarmoured bridge positions.Raven and Roberts, British Battleships of WW2, p415 Older RN battleships that were reconstructed with new superstructures had their heavily armoured conning towers removed and replaced with much lighter structures.

Naval Air Base Key West pilots flew in search of German submarines resting on the surface to recharge batteries. The aircraft was armed only with a single machine gun, but gunners were supplied with hand grenades. The slow Curtiss biplanes flew low over surfaced subs, and gunners dropped grenades into open conning towers. Naval aviation antisubmarine warfare was beginning to prove itself in combat.

Compton-Hall, p. 140. Late in their careers, the class was identified as the A class and the pennant numbers of all the submarines were prefixed with an A, becoming A-2 to A-7. None of the boats, however, ever displayed an A on their conning towers. Havmanden and Thetis were the first two boats taken out of service when they were stricken in April 1928.

303, 317–18 The barbettes ranged in thickness from with the main ammunition hoists protected by armoured tubes with walls 12 inches thick. The conning towers also had walls of that thickness as well as roofs thick. The deck of the central armoured citadel had a thickness of and the lower deck was thick from the ends of the belt to the bow and stern.

The walls of the rear conning tower were six inches thick. The roof and floor of both conning towers were KNC armour 2 inches thick while their communication tubes were of KNC. The signal tower immediately aft of the forward conning tower also had three inches of KNC. Mild steel torpedo bulkheads of 2.5-inch thickness were fitted abreast the magazines and shell rooms.

On s, the conning tower is a thick vertical armor-plated cylinder with slit windows located in the middle of the bridge, climbing from deck 03 all the way up to the flying bridge on 05. With the demise of battleships after World War II, along with the advent of missiles and nuclear weapons during the Cold War, modern warships no longer feature conning towers.

Submarine Force Library and Museum Conning Towers Nautilus Park is a census- designated place (CDP) in the town of Groton in New London County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 9,828 at the 2010 census.The population was revised from 8,834 following a Count Question Resolution procedure. The statistical area consists of the portion of the town in the vicinity of Route 12 and includes Naval Submarine Base New London.

These were supported by a secondary battery of four Modèle 1891 guns, which were carried in pivot mounts in the conning towers, one on each side per tower. The guns fired cast iron and AP shells with a muzzle velocity of . For close-range defense against torpedo boats, they carried ten 3-pounder Hotchkiss guns and five 1-pounder guns. The ships were also armed with two torpedo tubes in their hull above the waterline.

To assist the main battery with targeting during a battle, the two ships were equipped with two Barr & Stroud rangefinders that were located above the conning towers. Rivadavia and Moreno used Brown–Curtis geared steam turbines, powered by 18 Babcock & Wilcox boilers and connected to three propellers. With a total output of about , the ships were designed to travel at a maximum speed of and may have been capable of slightly more.

Forward, the belt reduced to and aft it was uniformly 356 mm thick. The upper edge of the belt was connected to the armor deck, which was thick and covered the machinery spaces. The barbettes for the main battery were composed of 406 mm of compound armor and the supporting tubes that protected the ammunition hoists were the same thickness, but were of steel construction. The sides for their forward conning towers were thick.

The problem was compounded by the fact that she was overweight on completion, which further reduced her freeboard. Her forward and aft conning towers included bridges that were cantilevered over the main battery turrets. The hull featured a pronounced ram bow. She was fitted with a pair of heavy military masts equipped with fighting tops that carried some of her light guns and were also used to spot for her main battery guns.

In December 1942, managed to penetrate Algiers harbor, and sank or seriously damaged several merchant ships with a total GRT over 20,000. In common with other Italian submarines the survivors were fitted with smaller conning towers in 1942–43. Overall, the Perla class submarines proved to be quite successful. They showed good maneuverability, their hull was well designed and strongly built to withstand depth pressure and explosions that exceeded their test values.

This difference led to casualties in Snapper and Sturgeon, and to the loss of Squalus.Blair, Silent Victory (New York, 1976), p.67. Larger than the design of the Porpoise-class, the conning tower installed by Electric Boat had two concave spherical ends, The Portsmouth design had a concave end aft and a convex one forward. Portsmouth and Mare Island ran into production difficulties with their conning towers, discovering cracks that caused the cylinder to fail the required pressure test.

The guns were later removed as the subs were modified with streamlined conning towers. The first order for the "real" L/60 was made by the Dutch Navy, who ordered five twin-gun mounts for the cruiser in August 1934. These guns were stabilized using the Hazemeyer mount, in which one set of layers aimed the gun, while a second manually stabilized the platform the gun sat on. All five mounts were operated by one fire control system.

Edgar Quinet was armed with a main battery of fourteen 50-caliber M1902 guns; four were in twin gun turrets forward and aft, with three single gun turrets on either broadside. The last four guns were mounted in casemates abreast the main and aft conning towers. Close-range defense against torpedo boats was provided by a battery of twenty guns in casemates in the ship's hull. She was also equipped with two torpedo tubes submerged in the hull.

Waldeck-Rousseau was armed with a main battery of fourteen 50-caliber M1902 guns; four were in twin gun turrets forward and aft, with three single gun turrets on either broadside. The last four guns were mounted in casemates abreast the main and aft conning towers. Close-range defense against torpedo boats was provided by a battery of twenty guns in casemates in the ship's hull. She was also equipped with two torpedo tubes submerged in the hull.

These were supported by a secondary battery of four guns, which were carried in pivot mounts in the fore and aft conning towers, one on each side per tower. For close-range defense against torpedo boats, she carried ten 3-pounder Hotchkiss guns and five 1-pounder guns. She was also armed with two torpedo tubes in her hull above the waterline. Armor protection consisted of a curved armor deck that was thick, along with 100 mm plating on the conning tower.

The 12,300-ton and 14,000-ton followed. With a speed of 22.5 knots, the Léon Gambettas were armed with four guns in twin turrets and 16 in four single and six twin turrets and were protected by up to of Krupp belt armor and nearly on their conning towers and turrets. The Edgar Quinets, slightly faster at 23 knots, were armed with 14 guns and carried up to of armor on their belts, almost on their decks and on their turrets.

The ships' offensive armament was augmented by a secondary battery of four Modèle 1891 guns, which were carried in pivot mounts in the conning towers, one on each side per tower. The guns fired cast iron and AP shells with a muzzle velocity of . All of the primary and secondary guns were fitted with gun shields to protect their crews. The offensive weaponry was rounded out by two torpedo tubes that were carried in their hulls above the waterline, one on either side.

They were placed in individual pivot mounts; one was on the forecastle, two were in sponsons abreast the conning tower, and the last was on the stern. These were supported by a secondary battery of four guns, which were carried in pivot mounts in the conning towers, one on each side per tower. For close- range defense against torpedo boats, she carried four 3-pounder Hotchkiss guns and eleven 1-pounder guns. She was also armed with two torpedo tubes in her hull above the waterline.

They were placed in individual pivot mounts; one was on the forecastle, two were in sponsons abreast the conning tower, and the last was on the stern. These were supported by a secondary battery of four guns, which were carried in pivot mounts in the conning towers, one on each side per tower. For close-range defense against torpedo boats, she carried four 3-pounder Hotchkiss guns and eleven 1-pounder guns. She was also armed with two torpedo tubes in her hull above the waterline.

They were placed in individual pivot mounts; one was on the forecastle, two were in sponsons abreast the conning tower, and the last was on the stern. These were supported by a secondary battery of four guns, which were carried in pivot mounts in the conning towers, one on each side per tower. For close- range defense against torpedo boats, she carried four 3-pounder Hotchkiss guns and eleven 1-pounder guns. She was also armed with two torpedo tubes in her hull above the waterline.

Illustration of Edgar Quinet The Edgar Quinet-class ships were armed with a main battery of fourteen 50-caliber M1902 guns; four were in twin gun turrets forward and aft, with three single gun turrets on either broadside. The turret mountings allowed for loading at any angle of elevation, and were electrically operated. The forward turrets had a range of train of about 280 degrees. The last four guns were mounted in casemates abreast the main and aft conning towers, on the upper and main decks, respectively.

The Navy hoped to finish the ship as quickly as possible and to keep costs to a minimum, and so requested permission from the Naval Inter-Allied Commission of Control to use steam turbines, boilers, and conning towers from scrapped vessels to complete Ersatz Niobe. The NIACC rejected the request. The Navy also hoped to use an armament of four twin-gun turrets for the new ship. The NIACC rejected the twin-turret design, but allowed the use of guns from existing stocks of spare barrels.

On 21 July 1960 she was transferred on loan to the Government of Argentina and was commissioned in the Argentine Navy as ARA Santiago del Estero (S-12). Along with ARA Santa Fe (former ), she was used mainly for training. The conning towers of both submarines were later locally upgraded to improve hydrodynamics.Historia y Arqueologia Marítima: Submarinos Clase "Balao" Some years ago, Argentinian officials disclosed that a group of tactical divers had carried out an incursion on the Falkland Islands on board the Santiago del Estero in October 1966.

The ship was fitted with a pair of pole masts at the main and rear conning towers, the masts carrying spotting tops. She had a short forecastle deck for the first third of the ship, stepping down to the main deck just aft of the forward conning tower. She had a crew of 13 officers and 234 enlisted men. The ship's propulsion system consisted of a four Parsons steam turbines, each driving a single screw propeller, with steam supplied by eight oil-fired and two coal-and-oil-fired Blechynden boilers.

The resolution of any radar is a function of the wavelength used and the size of the antenna. In the case of H2S, the antenna size was a function of the bomber's turret opening, and when combined with the 10 cm wavelength, this led to a resolution of 8 degrees in arc. This was much coarser than desired, both for mapping purposes and for Coastal Command's desires to easily detect submarine conning towers. On 6 February 1943, work began on an X band version of the electronics, operating at 3 cm.

O'Byrne and her two sister ships (Henri Fournier and Louis Dupetit-Thouars) were ordered by the Romanian Government from the Schneider Shipyard in Chalon-sur- Saône, being laid down in April 1917. However France seized the submarines for its navy during World War I. The three submarines were subsequently completed for the French Navy, with larger bridges and conning towers. O'Byrne was the first to be launched (22 May 1919), followed by Henri Fournier (30 September 1919) and Louis Dupetit-Thouars (12 May 1920). They were completed and commissioned in 1921.

Henri Fournier was ordered by the Romanian Government from the Schneider Shipyard in Gironde, being laid down in April 1917. However, Romania was forced out of the war in December 1917, when the construction of the warship was at an early stage. The submarine was subsequently completed for the French Navy, with larger bridges and conning towers. Henri Fournier was completed and commissioned in 1921. It had a surfaced displacement of 342 tons, measuring 52.4 meters in length, with a beam of 4.7 meters and a draught of 2.7 meters.

Louis Dupetit-Thouars was ordered by the Romanian Government from the Schneider Shipyard in Gironde, being laid down in April 1917. However, Romania was forced out of the war in December 1917, when the construction of the warship was at an early stage. The submarine was subsequently completed for the French Navy, with larger bridges and conning towers. Louis Dupetit-Thouars was completed and commissioned in 1921. It had a surfaced displacement of 342 tons, measuring 52.4 meters in length, with a beam of 4.7 meters and a draught of 2.7 meters.

Bulkheads thick separated the 75-millimeter gun positions. Peresvet had two conning towers, each with sides 6 inches thick, but the other two ships only had a forward conning tower with 9-inch sides. A communications tube 3 inches thick connected each conning tower to the armored deck in all three ships. The flat part of the deck in the central armored citadel consisted of a plate over the normal 0.75-inch structural steel deck plate; the sloped portion connected to the lower edge of the waterline belt and was 2.5 inches thick.

O'Byrne and her two sister ships (Henri Fournier and Louis Dupetit-Thouars) were ordered by the Romanian Government from the Schneider Shipyard in Gironde, being laid down in April 1917. However, Romania was forced out of the war in December 1917, when the construction of the three warships was at an early stage. The three submarines were subsequently completed for the French Navy, with larger bridges and conning towers. O'Byrne was the first to be launched (22 May 1919), followed by Henri Fournier (30 September 1919) and Louis Dupetit-Thouars (12 May 1920).

The weather was foul and the seas rough but the barrage squadron attacked anyway, first with gunfire and then with depth charges. reported that she shot a hole through one of the submarines' conning towers with a gun but other than that no other damage was thought to have occurred. USS Druid and her compatriots were successful in defending the strait and on the following day the Americans helped rescue the British crew of the battleship which had been torpedoed by UB-50 while passing through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. The war ended three days later on 11 November.

For close-range defense against torpedo boats, they carried a battery of numerous small-caliber, quick-firing guns. This comprised four 3-pounder Hotchkiss guns and eleven 1-pounder guns, all in individual mounts. The former were carried in pairs in the forward and aft conning towers on the upper deck; the latter were distributed around the ships, including atop the sponsons for the main guns and higher in the superstructure. Armor protection consisted of a curved armor deck that was thick on the flat, which increased to on the sloped sides, where it provided a measure of vertical protection.

Nevertheless, pressure from the Admiralty kept microwaves in everyone's mind. While the 1.5 m sets were fine for detecting larger ships, they could not effectively see smaller objects, like U-Boat conning towers. This was for the same reason that antennas need to be roughly the size of the wavelength; to provide a reasonable reflection, the objects need to be at several times larger than the wavelength. The Admiralty had the advantage of administering the UK's vacuum tube development efforts, under the Communication Valve Development Committee (CVD), and were able to continue development of suitable tubes.

The graphs of the data are colour coded to divide the battle into three epochs before the breaking of the Enigma code, after it was broken, and after the introduction of centimetric radar, which could reveal submarine conning towers above the surface of the water and even detect periscopes. Obviously this subdivision of the data ignores many other defensive measures the Allies developed during the war, so interpretation must be constrained. Codebreaking by itself did not decrease the losses, which continued to rise ominously. More U-boats were sunk, but the number operational had more than tripled.

Much larger than their predecessors (displacing 14,500 tons as compared to 8150 for New York), the Pennsylvanias "were closer to light battleships than to cruisers," according to naval historian William Friedman. They carried four and 14 guns, of armor on their belts, on their turrets and on their conning towers. Their deck armor was light at for flat surfaces and for sloped, a compromise made for faster speed (22 knots, compared with 20 knots for Brooklyn). Improved ammunition made their main guns as powerful as the guns of the battleship and their use of state instead of city names, usually reserved for capital ships, emphasized their kinship.

Panzerschiff Admiral Graf Spee represented Germany in the 1937 Cornation Fleet Review. The British press referred to the vessels as pocket battleships, in reference to the heavy firepower contained in the relatively small vessels; they were considerably smaller than contemporary battleships, though at 28 knots were slower than battlecruisers. At up to 16,000 tons at full load, they were not treaty compliant 10,000 ton cruisers. And although their displacement and scale of armor protection were that of a heavy cruiser, their main armament was heavier than the guns of other nations' heavy cruisers, and the latter two members of the class also had tall conning towers resembling battleships.

They were particularly interested in moving to much shorter wavelengths as a way to detect smaller objects, especially the conning towers and periscopes of U-boats. The Air Ministry's Airborne Group, led by Edward George Bowen, had the opposite problem of desiring antennas small enough to mount in the nose of a twin- engine aircraft. They had managed to adapt an experimental television receiver to 1.5 m, but this still required large antennas that had to be mounted on the wings. At a meeting between Bowen and the Admiralty Experimental Department's Charles Wright, they found many reasons to agree on the need for a 10 cm wavelength system.

The group gave up on further development for the time being. Development continued largely at the urging of the Admiralty, who saw it as a solution to detecting the conning towers of partially submerged U-Boats. After a visit by Tizard to GEC's Hirst Research Centre in Wembley in November 1939, and a follow-up visit by Watt, the company took up development and developed a working 25 cm set using modified VT90s by the summer of 1940. With this success, Lovell and a new addition to the Airborne Group, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, began experimenting with horn-type antennas that would offer significantly higher angular accuracy.

The new higher-frequency radar could spot conning towers, and periscopes could even be detected from airplanes. Some idea of the relative effect of cipher-breaking and radar improvement can be obtained from graphs showing the tonnage of merchantmen sunk and the number of U-boats sunk in each month of the Battle of the Atlantic. Of course, the graphs cannot be interpreted unambiguously, because it is impossible to factor in many variables such as improvements in cipher-breaking and the numerous other advances in equipment and techniques used to combat U-boats. Nonetheless, the data seem to favor the German view—that radar was crucial.

Above this was a citadel which was long, with armour 100 mm thick and barbettes with thick armoured steel, mounted on a main deck with armoured plate mounted on 22 mm steel plate. The conning towers were also armoured, thick forward and 100 mm aft, while the bridge and upper deck had plating thick. The turrets had Krupp armour which was between thick. The ship was first modernised in 1910 when a tripod mast was fitted, and other minor upgrades took place over the ship's life, including fitting new high angle mounts for two of the 57 mm guns for anti-aircraft defence in 1916.

The Royal Navy, United States Navy, and Imperial Japanese Navy extensively upgraded and modernized their World War I–era battleships during the 1930s. Among the new features were an increased tower height and stability for the optical rangefinder equipment (for gunnery control), more armor (especially around turrets) to protect against plunging fire and aerial bombing, and additional anti-aircraft weapons. Some British ships received a large block superstructure nicknamed the "Queen Anne's castle", such as in and , which would be used in the new conning towers of the fast battleships. External bulges were added to improve both buoyancy to counteract weight increase and provide underwater protection against mines and torpedoes.

DSRVs are equipped with docking chambers to allow personnel ingress and egress via a manhole. The real-life feasibility of any DSRV-based rescue attempt is hotly debated, because the few available docking chambers of a stricken submarine may be flooded, trapping the sailors still alive in other dry compartments. The only attempt to rescue a stricken submarine with these so far (the Russian submarine Kursk) ended in failure as the entire crew who survived the explosion had either suffocated or burned to death before the rescuers could get there. Because of these difficulties, the use of integrated crew escape capsules, detachable conning towers, or both have gained favour in military submarine design during the last two decades.

These investigations were spurred because the Germans had broken the British naval code and found the information useful. Their investigations were negative, and the conclusion was that their defeat "was due firstly to outstanding developments in enemy radar..."2, p. 26. The great advance was centimetric radar, developed in a joint British-American venture, which became operational in the spring of 1943. Earlier radar was unable to distinguish U-boat conning towers from the surface of the sea, so it could not even locate U-boats attacking convoys on the surface on moonless nights; thus the surfaced U-boats were almost invisible, while having the additional advantage of being swifter than their prey.

Idaho off Iceland in 1942, showing her post-1934-refit configuration The members of the New Mexico class received a series of modifications even while under construction, including the already noted alterations to the secondary battery, which was authorized on 7 February 1918 by which time New Mexico had been completed with her original twenty-two guns. The other two ships had already had their casemates built into their hulls, so they were simply plated over, unlike the later Tennessees, which had their hulls faired in. Their conning towers were modified with a newly developed bridge arrangement that became standard for all American battleships of the period. It consisted of a fully enclosed navigation bridge on the forward side of the tower, with a large chart house located behind the bridge.

STS was used as homogeneous armor that was less than thick; homogeneous armor for gun mounts and conning towers, where the thicknesses were considerably greater, used Bureau of Ordnance Class "B" armor which had similar protective properties as STS. Somewhat more ductile than the average for any similar armor, even Krupp's post-World War I "Wotan weich" armor, STS could be used as structural steel, whereas traditional armor plate was entirely deadweight. STS was expensive, but the United States could afford to use it, lavishly, and did so on virtually every class of warship constructed from 1930 through the World War II era, in thicknesses ranging from bulkheads to splinter protection to armored decks to lower armor belts. After World War II, the Bureau of Ships conducted a research program for developing a high strength steel for ship and submarine construction.

Naval architects and sailors from the Western hemisphere claimed that the Japanese battleships were too "top-heavy" and critics often mocked these vessels by nicknaming them "Christmas Trees". Uniquely the battleship Hiei received a prototype of the pagoda-style tower-mast that would eventually be used on the upcoming s, then still in the design phase, rather than the pagoda masts used on her sister ships and other modernized World War I-era capital ships. During the same interwar period, the Royal Navy implemented the "Queen Anne's Mansions" style conning tower and bridge, either retrofitted World War I-era battleships (three of the , ) or for new battleships ( and classes). Between World War I and World War II, the US Navy would gradually phase out the cage masts on its Standard type battleships in favor of tripod masts, and after Pearl Harbor some of the salvaged battleships were reconstructed with conning towers similar to those on its post-treaty battleships.

A number of other Star Wars spacecraft, such as Star Destroyers, may also have been influenced by Berkey's designs of naval-style ships with smooth hulls and conning towers bristling with antennae. Berkey was commissioned by Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox in 1976 to provide some of the first poster art for Star Wars. Among this work was a painting which depicted the character Luke Skywalker brandishing a lightsaber, flanked by Princess Leia Organa the robots C-3PO and R2-D2, and a number of Imperial stormtroopers; in the background is a large figure of Darth Vader looming behind them, a similar composition to the theatrical poster artwork for Star Wars by Tom Jung and the Brothers Hildebrandt. When the novelization of the film was published, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, the United Kingdom edition published by Sphere Books featured cover art by Berkey (Ballantine Books' US edition originally featured a cover by Ralph McQuarrie).

The ships also had Mark 3 fire-control radars installed. The Navy considered removing their heavily armored conning towers to compensate for the increased weight of the new equipment, but the work could not be accomplished in the eight-week overhaul period that had been scheduled, so they retained their original towers, unlike many of the other older battleships that were rebuilt early in the war. Since many of the American battleships had been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor, the three New Mexicos were too valuable to be removed from operational status for the necessary amount of time to substantially rebuild them. As a result of these limitations, New Mexico and Mississippi received a series of rolling changes over the course of late 1942 and into 1943; while at Pearl Harbor in October 1942, they had four of their 5-inch /51 guns removed, along with their directors, to free up space for a pair of quadruple Bofors guns and the shielded tubs for the 1.1-inch guns were converted for use with the 40 mm mounts, though the 1.1-inch guns remained until 1943.

The Germans received help from their allies. From August 1940, a flotilla of 27 Italian submarines operated from the BETASOM base in Bordeaux to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic, initially under the command of Rear Admiral Angelo Parona, then of Rear Admiral Romolo Polacchini and finally of Ship-of-the-Line Captain Enzo Grossi. The Italian submarines had been designed to operate in a different way than U-boats, and they had a number of flaws that needed to be corrected (for example huge conning towers, slow speed when surfaced, lack of modern torpedo fire control), which meant that they were ill-suited for convoy attacks, and performed better when hunting down isolated merchantmen on distant seas, taking advantage of their superior range and living standards. While initial operation met with little success (only 65343 GRT sunk between August and December 1940), the situation improved gradually over time, and up to August 1943 the 32 Italian submarines that operated there sank 109 ships of 593,864 tons, for 17 subs lost in return, giving them a subs-lost-to-tonnage sunk ratio similar to Germany's in the same period, and higher overall.