Skipping shot!

[ShiverMyTimber]

Shouldn't we introduce skimming cannonballs along the water (just like skimming stones), I know it was used by some navies in the 17th century (and I'll try to pull up a source on that). The advantage given with skimming your cannonballs along the water is they'll score right along the waterline of the enemy ship, presenting for very nasty leaks (and something doesn't need to be flat and smooth to skim along water. I've managed to skim half bricks along water (albeit not for very long before they sank) however a round ball at high velocity would definitely 'engage' with the surface of the water though would lose velocity over distance until it either sank short of it's target or bounced off her hull with no to very minimal damage rather than penetrating.
Of course this would mean you would have to work out the angle and distance to the ship perfectly, making this an advanced tactic and requiring high poundage guns to penetrate the hull of a ship of a similar size or low poundage guns only being able to damage smaller ships in this way.

Since long guns would have a higher muzzle velocity they should skim balls better, medium sized guns would skim balls to a 'middle' amount and then carronades, having low muzzle velocities and very little in the way of muzzle velocity and would be somewhat hit and miss when it comes to skimming balls, encouraging carronade users to stick to the hull armour directly; possibly on warships to be used as a boarding weapon rather than a 'sinking weapon' as with carronades you can get in close, fire double shot (which I don't think would be possible, considering the shortness of the barrel; though it's a developer choice), wreck their hull and de-mast them, fire in some grape then grapple them.

I think skimming shot should be in game as it was a valid naval tactic back then and has been a valid tactic even in the modern era (dambuster bombs) though it should carry with it the penalty of reduced velocity losing about 1-2% damage per yard before losing so much velocity that the ball just sinks at about 25-30 yards. It would be useful to force people to switch between damage control and gunnery, potentially giving you the upper hand as he fixes the leaks. Naturally leaks caused by this wouldn't cause a huge amount of damage to the hull armour, but it would cause it to start  leaking. Obviously every tactic or weapon has a weakness. I couldn't see this working at super short ranges as you would be depressing your guns so much that the cannonballs just go straight under.

Any ideas?

[maturin]

Would be nice to see, but I bet it would add a lot of complexity to the ballistics and thus the hardware resources/netcode.

[OlavDeng2]

Would be nice to see, but I bet it would add a lot of complexity to the ballistics and thus the hardware resources/netcode.

this, physics can be a resource heavy thing, if you look at physics heavy games like the arma series... it is not the graphics that causes the low framerate but rather the high amount of physics calculations having to be done so devs have to be carefull.