Exactly via torpedos and mortars and depth charges, also fired mortar fashion. Do you really think those charges could not take out that ship?
Yes they were never designed to fight large ships, they were designed as escourts and to tackle subs or other destroyers mostly. But that doesn't mean a modern warship couldn't of taken on a pre dreadnaught ship. The dreadnaught would be woefully out classed.
I think you might have a problem with understanding how naval combat works and how much maneuvarability and speed matter: 38 knots for your destroyers vs, what 12 or 13 knots of an Iron clad? If you can out maneuver a ship vastly that ship will never target you. The same thing goes for arial combat, for example the Hawker Hurricane had a smaller turning circle than the german planes, and so it could get on a planes six by using swift turns; likewise you could dance around that tub and hole it with torpedoes and it couldn't even get a fix on you with its guns. It would be stupidly out manuevered and its guns would only have any accuracy within short range, even if they could get a fix. Assuming the Destroyer could stay out of range it could pick it off with torpedoes at its leisure or get in behind it and as it tried to move to bear guns out turn it keeping out of the line of any artillery.
It's certainly hard to hit a fast-moving target. For example your argument has swiftly moved from "puny pre-dreadnought guns couldn't penetrate mighty destroyer armour" to "a 2000 ton unarmoured destroyer could ram a 14000 ton armoured ship of the line" to "the destroyer should plink away at long range" to now "the destroyer should close to point-blank and somehow try to sink a surface capital ship with depth charges and hedgehogs(?????)". You're changing your tune so rapidly it's hard to know which strange notion I'm supposed to be tilting against. I suspect you're just having a laugh, but hey, I like talking about boats, so I'll bite.
So let's play this game. Let's say the main guns of a pre-dread can't train as fast as needed to hit the destroyer (which I will grant only at extremely close ranges). Turns out that back in the day, navies of the world had their knickers in a knot about the danger of small, fast torpedo boats (overblown, as it happens). So they invented destroyers. But what they also did was shove a whole horde of fast-firing, smaller-calibre guns onto their capital ships specifically to counter smaller ships - like torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers. So there's still, for example, 10 6-inch guns, 16 6-pounders and 12 3-pounders. Lot of ordnance against an unarmoured ship.
Torpedoes? I'm not going to repeat what I've already said except to say that yes, they were the only thing a destroyer had that could hope to harm a pre-dread, but no, the likelihood of getting a hit was very low. A group of destroyers firing spreads against a lone, unprotected pre-dread? Now you're talking, but the same is true for any unprotected capital ship, and you'll still probably lose a destroyer or two in the process. Unless you have the element of surprise, surface-launched torpedoes are mostly useful for disrupting formations and forcing ships to dodge. Torpedoes are just too slow from the ranges a surface ship needs to fire them to be much threat against a warship that can see them coming and has room to get out of the way (they'd have a few minutes) - whether that ship be 17 knots or 30.
Also as I said I was on about targeting weak points, repeatedly battering the same area will pierce any ships armour, all it takes is time. Gun ports for example are a particular weak spot that can be used to get shells between the most heavily armoured areas.
For all your talk of dodging and weaving afore and astern, you create another problem - unless you're firing from the pre-dread's broadside, you're hitting the only armour you have a hope against at a very oblique angle, massively reducing penetrative ability. And Royal Sovereign had 17 inch barbette armour on its guns, so you're not getting through that way. If there's one thing we know about pre-dreads (mostly from Tsushima), it's that they could take an incredible amount of punishment, and that it really required sustained shelling from 12-inch or larger guns to really do anything much of anything.
And no Japanese ships and British ships had heavier guns with AP shells to deal with heavily armoured German destroyers. You're just woefully wrong and you assume way too much about the capabilities and armaments of all navies.
Source? I can't find any evidence of any British, American or Japanese destroyers with anything larger than 5", and only the Narvik class of German destroyers with 5.8" guns (later German designs went back to 5"). Overwhelmingly, the largest guns on the vast majority of destroyers in WWII were 4.7 or 5 inch.
The tubs armour may be thick but it cannot face torpedoes and mortars or depth charges and survive. It cannot target a ship that is 3 or 4 times faster and has a turning circle two or 3 times smaller and hence is more maneuverable. This is just the reality. If these pre-dreadnaughts were so much better than modern warships why the hell did they scrap them all after the dreadnaught class came out? Riddle me that Batman?
Why were they scrapped? Mostly they weren't; they were still useful as second rates even if they couldn't hope to go toe-to-toe with post-dreadnought battleships, and a number even fought in the main battle line at Jutland. They were still used all over the place in WWI. Beyond that, many were getting physically old; they couldn't maintain the cruising speed/range of the rest of the fleet at a strategic/operational level (not so much the tactical level); the Germans scuttled most of their fleet to keep it out of the hands of the Brits; and the Washington treaty came along and forced dreadnoughts and pre-dreadnoughts alike to be broken up, since nobody wanted to count older, less effective ships in their allowed capital ship tonnage.
If a tank is obsoleted by newer tank designs it may no longer be much use in a pitched armoured engagement, but does that suddenly make it vulnerable to small-arms fire? Of course not. I really don't understand your dreadnought argument here. Actually it kind of works against you, since the main advantage of dreadnoughts vs pre-dreadnoughts was that it turned out that having more heavy guns wins every time. I'm not arguing that a pre-dread could take on a dreadnought, but rather that it retained enough arms and armour that it could still in many ways fulfill the role of an armoured cruiser.
It is civilised I have not insulted you. Your specious nonsense is nonsense but telling you that is perfectly civilised. Clearly you don't know how naval warfare works, that's not my problem. Believe whatever you want a modern wartime destroyer would crap on an ironclad, that's just a fact.
Yeah, it's been fun.
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