That might help slightly in dd vs dd fights at times but you should not be playing to just beat one ship
but to beat ships higher than your tier, survive, and then still be able to fight several other ships. Most
people feel it's a win if they survive with 100 HP after beating a similar dd. To me that's a loss.
Only an armored UK DD should be in a slugfest.
Sorry I think I ranted lol.
Another thought is, you can only make that observation if the ship you face is always the same with the
same setup. One game you might face a DDX with 6" guns and take a lot of damage. You put on
a bit of armor and next game you face a DDX with 5" guns then it might seem like your armor is working
but it was the opponents' conditions that changed. Consider there are are many guns, nations, shell
types and unless you do a controlled test, you might be wasting the armor.

im pretty sure one inch of belt doesnt do anything. It may have seemed to help but it was most likely against other DDs who were using weaker guns. (and no, i dont know the exact amount of belt needed to bounce different caliber shells)

i like to put 0.3 belt on all my ships to reduce a bit of torpedo damage just in case.

and the "slugging matches" really shouldnt happen if u want improve and take on more than one ship in a game. Speed and range are what will keep you alive.

There might be slight changes such as reducing by a few %. Yes vs a similar DD it could help but in that
kind of match you will still end up damaged too much. Your priority should be speed and avoiding damage
completely. Many people fight slugging matches but that's not the way it will be at higher levels. So if you
want to armor I think UK would be the choice. As a note, I put about 6 inch belt armor to get 0 damage from
most small ships.

Doesn't work that way.


It either hits for is normal damage

Or gets bounced.


1" of belt won't bounce anything but belt fired but maybe KM Flak guns.

Don't get used to armor on US, the only really effect ships are the New Orleans. Even then I would prefer the speed than the armor.

.2-.5 belt max (30%-70% torp damage reduction, note over .5 changes are minimal and almost non-existent.

bulge til just before losing a knot of OH.

Thought I'd chime in for a sec.
Significant damage reduction can be difficult to define for smaller ships.
For example, I've fought many DDXs in my time. Normally they take 200-300 damage off my NDD.
I came across one that had armor. It reduced damage to about 125-200 which with my limited
ammo made me angry. So 1 belt could be a slight reduction but I likely wouldn't even notice.
I guess I'm trying to answer this in the context of how the OP is playing which is vs other ships with
smaller caliber weapons. Armoring US ships though is not going to pay off in the long run.

~ I put about 6.2 belt on L class. I can randomly bounce 6" and 5"s consistently or reduce damage
to low double digits. I believe back in the day, they called me a hacker for that :(

I've already read all the guides I could for USN ships so I know that long term armoring isn't really viable. I keep about 0.2 belt on my Atlanta, plus as much bulge as I can without losing more than a knot of speed but thats it. That seems to be the max recommended by consensus. I was just curious if anyone else had noticed anything similar when going up against other dd's, not trying to spark so heated a debate. Obviously people have some strong opinions on the subject. And yes I never thought it would help against cl/ca's but not much does except jinking like crazy and firing as fast as you can.

My question for that would be are you really "beating" the armor on the ship at range? My understanding, both from the game and real life is that at range you aren't really beating armor, but going around it. The whole idea of the immunity zone was that at close range your belt would protect you, up to a certain distance which was the lower bound of the immunity zone. Any distance farther away than this lower bound, shells would bounce off your belt armor until you reached the upped bound of the zone, after which the shells would be falling at a high enough angle they would hit your deck armor instead, with enough force left to punch through.

From what I know of the game, most people neglect the deck, so at long ranges shells tend to hit unarmored sections of the ship. Plus there's a bonus for HA attacks, which is why its recommended for lower level ships. Its something I've been trying to work on with my Atlanta, but my BO and gunners aren't really high enough to always make it work quite yet.