Indeed, @aztecjaguar – the ship herself was fine. Okay, the aluminum and plastic used in the construction of her superstructure wasn’t the best, but very normal for the time. The path that leads to this seemingly bizarre choice is sadly logical:

Anti-ship missiles basically never miss, and pack enough firepower to blow almost any ship half out of the water.

Ergo, the idea of “armor” on warships in the mid 1970s seemed pretty pointless.

So ships were built without armor. This made them faster, cheaper, more fuel efficient, and allowed more weight and space to be reserved for what really counted: electronics.

Fair enough, but these electronics have to be mounted high in the ship, in ever-expanding superstructures. Well, as the superstructures grew larger and the hulls grew lighter, the ships became TOP HEAVY and less sea worthy.

So how to save weight on superstructures? Lighter materials: like aluminium and plastic.

Fair enough, since “metal armor” isn’t going to save you anyway from an Exocet (*or Tomahawk or Harpoon or Kingfisher or other contemporary ASMs). But aluminum and plastic … burns. And there’s the real fate of HMS Sheffield.

As we covered in Part 03, the missile that hit her actually never even exploded, as incredible as that sounds. But the raw kinetic impact and the horrific splash of unspent fuel pretty much lit the whole core of the ship on fire from the inside out (I think the missile actually wound up in the galley – and the water mains and pumps were also among the infrastructure hit in the initial impact). So once the fire started, it just became impossible to ever really bring it under control. Even other ships that came along side to lend assistance with water hoses, firefighting teams, and electrical power, wound up making no difference. Sheffield would sink 10 days layer.

But the Type 42 was not a bad air-defense destroyer in concept, especially when ships like HMS Glasgow and later HMS Exeter and HMS Cardiff were paired with a British Type 22 Frigate. This matchup was so successful they called it the “Type 64 Combo” – the root of its success coming from the Type 42’s longer-ranged Sea Dart air defense missile system “layering” atop the Type 22’s Sea Wolf short range air defense missile system. Anything that got through these two layers could then be cross-engaged in a scissor between the guns of both ships.