Talk:Colorado/@comment-49.144.137.161-20190527004555/@comment-47.198.21.159-20190528032828

Sloped armor deck schemes were not superior in real life, only in World of Warships because reasons. IRL, sloped armor decks required the deck to be mounted lower in the hull, reducing the number of crew and machinery spaces that it protected against shells hitting above the waterline, and the actual effectiveness of the sloped deck was found to not be that high in practice except as splinter protection, especially on older battleships like Warspite and Fuso, whose sloped armor decks were made of plates of laminated construction steel rather than proper armor. Bismarck and Nagato fair a little bit better as they had thicker slopes than older ships, but this was still only internal armor, which meant that it helped prevent fatal magazine penetrations, but did nothing against hull penetrations, which caused the most floods, fires and crew deaths in actual battles.

Bismarck took a long time to sink because of her thick sloped deck and the poor penetration perfomance of British AP shells, but she was disabled early in the battle because every shell that penetrated her relatively mediocre external armor caused extensive damage to the insides of the ship that werent covered by the sloped deck. The All or Nothing design scheme was based around improving the armor's area of coverage and its resistance to external penetrations to keep the ship combat capable for longer. Sloped armor decks are also very weight inefficient. Compared to Littorio and Richelieu, Bismack was slower, more lightely armed, and had thinner belt, deck and turret armor despite being larger and heavier than both of them.

There were very good reasons why every navy that actually mattered except Germany went to the All or Nothing design instead.