flyingtaco

The way the ships are now length changes based on displacement and not much else. The best thing to happen here would have a click and drag arrangement for hull and tower components so that each has a certain level of user customization and get rid of the snap points. Where I see problems is the volume required for fuel etc but a lot of what people are upset about are the placement limitations for guns and towers. Right now it's like henry ford's answer "you can have any color model T you want... so long as its black."

I dint think it needs to go as far as making new parts but the towers ... I'd like to expand or compress elements of them ... the existing tower system makes it awkward if you have a long hull etc . Lots of dead space that is not able to be properly utilized and it messes with the weight distribution. Virtually all ww2 wra heavies such as iowa and yamato had secondaries at multiple levels. In game is it is now you have main deck turreted secondaries or maybe casemated ones on the towers and these limit what you can do. I hope the new fast battleship themed parts can help but I'd like to get away from predefined snap on spots as much as possible

How do you you mean? Even kerbal does not have user defined parts. It's more like a game I had on my phone for a while ... simple aircraft or something like that.

I dont know if that is the correct term or not but there exists in other games a a dragging method that modifies the same of parts. Say you have a tower of some type.. presently the only way to have two tier secondaries is to put as many on the deck as you can and then hope the size and configuration you chose sits on the preddetermined spots on the tower part the right way. If this method was implemented you could make the the superstructure as narrow or wide as need be and add what would in effect be an 01, 02 03 etc deck one at a time rather than a singular assembly. This would allow more secondary density etc.

Those effects are kind of manufactured ... I'd rather see them balanced by cost and weight rather than fictitious effects upon certain shell types... the only input powder has on a shell is how fast it leaves the barrel.... it doesnt impart any sort of extra explosive ability etc... shell performance is dictated by the types of fuses and physical make up of the shell and the the explosives they contain. I doubt they will do it but they had charts for each gun that gave the expected performance at a certain angle, shell weight, powder weight etc to the point that time of flight could be predicted and by setting mechsnical time fuses could air burst shells over ships or ground targets.

I'm not sure why you would want to anyway if you are having to engage six targets with one ship then the outcome is already in doubt .

In if fully put into play there are three levels of control and it's been a while since I read upon it butvill trybto capture it as best I can: director or automatic control is where the guns of a given type are slaved to a director with a gun plot with mechanical computers as intermediaries which allows the director to sight in all guns on a single target and this version often used radar and range finders in the director. The gun computers issue orders to match each of the turrets with the target the director is targeting. Depending on the number of directors and computers the main or secondary battery of a bb could be split between targets. There are limitations .... the computers dealt with combinations of weight and powder unique to their own systems so you would not control a 5 inch gun with say a 16 inch computer but you could use a 5 inch director and tie it into a 16 inch computer because the director only supplied projectile independent variables. The next is pointer control where the sighting data from the computer was sent to displays in the appropriate sections of the turrets and the trainers and pointers matched the data sent to them. It's basically director control with a extra step and this was considered a back up most of the time. Third is local control where each turret is more or less firing at their own targets using backup computers inside the turrets themselves and getting target data from range keepers in the turrets themselves.. the ears on many turrets house the mirrors for these range finders. Depending on the era some or all of these features would be present. On an iowa you could get target data from 9 directors the two mk 38 directors, the 4 mk 37 directors, the mk40 director in the armored conning tower, and at a minimum also turret two which tended to hold onto its stereoscopic range finder while the coincidence range finder in turret 1 and 3 were removed (depending upon the time in question) there were two main battery plots with computers and I think at least two secondary plot rooms with two mk1a computers each so right there you can fight two targets with the main battery and 4 with the secondaries. All thr mounts could do local control but accuracy would suffer.

Imagine it depends on the navy... the HTC and a0 rounds on the iowas were pretty similar in dimensions but the ap only had like 40 pounds of explosive D vs around 140 ir so in the hugh capacity shells.. of course they hollowed out the shell to make room for the explosive so they shattered easier but...

Seems impossible to make tiered secondaries or place them on the superstructure as well ... so you cant do two level secondaries and barbettes on seem to work on the centerline and are keyed to primary guns only... so even the larger 8 inch turrets can't be used. ... just the way towers work in general is screwy cant place anything on them unless something they have purposely designed the tower to allow. It's like the snap feature in kerbal being turned on .....

And closely related... dye packets for shells.

It's a tricky thing historically adm sims and mahan had a back and forth and this very topic and the break even point for larger fewer guns is when better fire control comes along. Uncontrolled... tou increase your chance of hits with more faster firing guns. The great American victory at the battle of Santiago was the result of around 2 percent hits with locally controlled guns without range finders for the most part .... fast forward to guadalcanal Washington I think got 9 out of 40 or so but it seems that the measuring stick for the interwar battleship was around 30 percent hits with large caliber guns.

Yeah it seems like they start snap points gave up on implementation and left so the game suffers because neither system is optimised

It is not always apparent if additions and subtractions are being made symmetrically. Sometimes I add a turret but one does not appear on the other side, leaving the ship unbalanced because it is not always possible to mirror image manually

some of those cutters were the first vessels of the Texas Navy .... there were two actual ones and the currently existing one is a commemorative organization. good little ships.