alecsandros wrote:Nevertheless, the 15" British APC fired from the L42 guns was a very dangerous shell, and had good horizontal perforating power...
Only at long range. The British found none of their battleship shells could defeat 6" modern homogenous armour at less than 32,000 yards in firing range testing. At short and medium range it will most likely scoop off of high quality homogenous armour due to its head shape.
To go back to the original faulty presumption behind this, lets look at the mythological 14" hit on Scharnhorst at 19,500 meters but leave out any effects of de-capping ...ect... We could treat the 80mm-95mm panzer deck just as if it was the only armoured deck, as in all or nothing design in our analysis:
The angle of fall is ~17*. I repeat the angle of fall is ~17*, or 73* from the normal. It is going to scoop most likely. Even using a popular computer model which does not properly account for the head shape of the British shell and their want to scoop, the penetration is less than 80mm. It is 71mm. This is particularly the case once we also factor in those other factors unique to the German armouring scheme and materials properties.
Remember this was a stern chase, so target angle is going to be rather oblique for a hit to pass over the main belt through the thinn upper belt and reach the panzer deck intact. Even if by chance the mythological hit just happened to come in and pass over the main belt at a time when the target angle was not very oblique, it will at least be fused. The distance to be covered to reach the panzer deck at 17* angle of fall is more than 16 meters. The shell will explode well before that. In order for the mythological hit to happen; the odds are rather long indeed.