>>11381695>due to aircraft carriersThat's not entirely true, although planes played a key role. Big battleships can also be countered by small destroyers, torpedo boats, and submarines, basically anything that can launch a torpedo, and this makes them incredibly inefficient in the economic sense. You're also putting a lot of eggs in the same basket (materials, money, men, fuel, etc), which further makes them a bad investment in case it gets disabled or sunk. This was demonstrated very early in WWI, but because of ideological beliefs in the upper commands of most navies, and because of political dick waving, fuckhuge ships kept being built.
At any rate, for armor evolution just refer to tanks. Composite armor and advanced materials like ceramics and aramid fibers (Kevlar) is the meta nowadays. Warship would probably implement some sort of energy absorption design in their hull to keep them from splitting in half in case of a torpedo strike. I mean they clearly already do, just look at any recent RIMPAC SINKEX video: those ships are quite old and can sustain a lot of abuse despite their small size.
