Oh The Wonderful Ironclads!

 To begin my Spaceship ramblings, I will start from the get go, and from the situation the partially inspired me to start this blog. 

Several days ago, while I was procrastinating by planning various vessels for my dream campaign about sky pirates fighting steampunk robots, and simultaneously flipping through Steampunk Conveyances, I have noticed one thing. In the entry for Majestic-class Pre-Dreadnought battleship, I noted, that it has a lot of armor - something around DR 500 in the hull and 700+ in some other vital area. Having just flipped through Spaceships 7, which contains an Ether Ironclad, that's supposed to be inspired by a similar vessel (those among you, who are of great knowledge of history of vessels marine will doubtless note to me, that Pre-Dreadnought battleships are not, in fact, ironclads, and were actually clad in some kind of steel - to which I would reply, that Spaceships armor is pretty abstract, and that Iron Armor can actually represent a TL5 steel, for the lowest grade steel is actually TL7, so does not quite fit the description.)

And so, after looking at the stats again, I get the hang of the fact, that the highest armored section of Ether ironclad only has DR 180, which is around 2,7 times lower than hull armor of the Majestic (or 2 times if we scale the ship up to SM+11). Such injustice, of course, offended me most deeply - and I decided to fix it. 

The main starting points for me have been 
1. Majestic-class battleship has armor thickness of 9 inches.

2. A mass of all the iron armor on SM+11 Ether Ironclad is 7500 tons.

Then, we compare the hulls of Majestic and Ether Ironclad, and find out they're not really that different in measurements at SM+11, with similar length. Now, this is gonna be important for out calculation that surface area of our Ether Ironclad is approximately 1,814,400 square inches. Then, via magical font of knowledge, that is Google, we find out, that Iron or cheap steel armor would weight around 0,86 pounds per cubic inch. After finding out all that, we can install a simple equation for our ship:

(1,814,400 * 9 * 0.86) = 7021,728  -  now we have a mass in tons for our ship's armor, if it had armor thickness of 9 inches exactly. 

Then, by just making our thickness into an X, and making our mass a constant of 7500 tons, we can make it work, using powers of mathematic. 

(1,814,400 * X * 0.86) = 7500.; X =9,61 - inches of thickness.
Now, to finish the job avenging our precious Ironclad, we take the numbers for TL5 iron armor DR from the Basic Set  Cover DR rules. (Those who want, may use Low-Tech Armor Design rules)

Basic Set tells us that the DR is around 40-60. So, it's safe to pick 50 as the medium value. This suggests to us, that Overall DR of Ether ironclad should be around 481 in average.