disc

The fire allocation issue also involves concentration fire. It would be relatively difficult to figure out which ships in a division were straddling the target if they all fired at once. The shell splashes would be hard to tell apart, unless the guns were of very different caliber (eg 6in vs 12in). Thus, if a group of battleships wanted to target a single enemy, they would need to coordinate their fire, a proposition that requires special training. Otherwise, accuracy would be poor beyond short range.

It depends highly upon the era and nation in question, and the role and threats envisaged. 1. As far as I know, US battleships never had sonar or hydrophones. I am unsure how the Lexington battlecruisers would have been equipped, but I think hydrophones are plausible. The Omaha class of cruisers had passive hydrophones, intended for surface scouting. After this, the Pensacola, Northampton, Portland, and New Orleans classes evidently had both passive and active sets. The US then abandoned sonar and hydrophones for later gun cruisers, excepting the Atlantas, which had at least active sets. After the war, the submarine-killer cruiser Norfolk had sonar sets; I don't know about Northampton, but I suspect not. Many missile cruisers were also sonar equipped, but that's getting beyond the timeframe. 2. I am uncertain about older Japanese battleships, but the Yamatos had hydrophones from at least 1943/1944. There may have been a sonar set as well, according to some diagrams. Japanese cruisers lacked sonar until 1938, when the Tone class was commissioned with a passive and (probably) an active set. The Agano and Oyodo classes were also equipped with active and passive arrays. Many surviving heavy cruisers appear to have been equipped with passive arrays in 1943/1944, and some of the old light cruisers received various sets as well during WWII. 3. Although active sonar was invented in France during WWI, during the interwar period France largely failed to develop operational active or passive sets for its surface ships. I do not believe any French battleships or cruisers were so equipped, at least not until the end of the war. 4. Germany evidently equipped multiple battleships and cruisers with active sonar, namely the Bismarcks, Scharnhorsts, and Admiral Hippers. Not very clear when they were so outfitted, but probably by 1940. Prinz Eugen and the Deutschlands had passive GHG arrays; it's uncertain about the others, but Bluecher may have too. 5. Italy appears to have neglected sonar and hydrophones in the interwar period, so that not many sets were developed and few ships equipped. 6. I don't know enough about Royal Navy policy to say for certain, but I believe at least some cruisers had active or passive sets. 7. The Soviet Union developed passive "Arktur" sets for its battleships and cruisers. Installation details unclear. Most of these big-ship sets were probably installed in order to detect and avoid submarines. I would not say this was entirely successful. Passive sets would be useful for search, but they were often limited to very slow speeds because of noise. Active sets were generally too directional for highly effective search, and they were usually limited to 15-20 knots at most, with achieveable ranges dropping with increased speed -- perhaps tracking a submarine at 2000 yards at 5-10 knots and 500 yards at 15-20 knots. Of all these prewar and wartime sets, it seems that the passive German GHG was the most effective in detecting torpedoes: US testing credited it with successful detection up to 2km at 20 knots. However, I doubt this was particularly reliable. The current game system strikes me as unrealistic.

This partial penetration change is mostly a band-aid. Our current armor model makes it necessary, as so much of the ship is armored. There were vessels with full-thickness belts covering almost their whole side, like Dupuy de Lome. But these were not half so common as ships with thinner upper belts and graduated bow and stern armor. All-or-nothing also did not have such coverage. Some of the ways for small guns to inflict damage are thus unavailable for us. There is no thin upperwork armor to penetrate with 8in AP. However, I think that a relatively simple fix would be possible.

I think a catapult item is essential to have in the designer, even if all it does is increase accuracy at long range and give better campaign scouting.

On the other hand, before WWI, big-gun HE was extremely popular and cannot be neglected. The eponymous Dreadnought was designed per the then-current hypothesis that battles would be decided by big-gun HE shells fired at long range, with AP used only to finish off opponents at short range. It's true that AP essentially took over for ship-to-ship combat on battleships after WWI, but I feel imposing a blanket removal is too aggressive, given that big HE shells were so popular before the war. The Duncan class of battleships, for example, completed 1903-1904, carried 320 combat shells for its 12in guns, of which 216 were Common (ie HE), 64 were AP shell, and 40 were AP shot.

Japan actually did not seem to like big HE very much for anti-ship purposes after Jutland: They were very impressed by the use of German AP at long range at Jutland. Development of large HE shells sort of stalled out after WWI. As far as I am aware, the 41cm gun used on the Nagatos lacked HE entirely until 1940. The 14in/36cm guns had a HE shell, the Common Type 3, from 1915, but there was no new HE design for another 25 years. The 46cm Type 5, which would have armed some ships of the post WWI program, also apparently lacked HE. Medium caliber guns are a little less clear-cut. The 20cm Type 3 No.1 and No.2 both had HE from the start, but the 15.5cm Type 3 (the Mogami/Oyodo/Yamato gun) did not have HE until 1940. In fact, the Mogamis lacked HE for their main guns for their whole lives until they were regunned with the 20cm. In 1940, Japan introduced HE for all its guns of cruiser size and bigger, with the new Type 0 Common shell (and then, for most guns, the Type 3 incendiary common and its derivatives). My limited understanding is that these were generally issued with time fuzes, at least to begin with. This would make them suitable mainly for AA and shore bombardment. I do suspect the Type 88 nose percussion fuze could be substituted for time fuzes, but I am far from certain that was universally true. I am rather convinced that IJN battleship main guns were "supposed to" use AP in basically all anti-ship combat. The IJN fortuitously discovered (in the middle of combat, it seems) that the HE time fuze was a little "defective", and the fuze and shell would detonate when impacting other ships. The distinct impression given by the US Technical Mission documents is that this was an unintended side-effect. This served the IJN well in the Solomons, when guns loaded for shore bombardment fired on unexpected American attackers.

Yes, prescribed battle speed for some ships was sometimes much less than maximum speed. Biggest example of this I can think of are some of the big French "contre-torpilleur" type of destroyers. The Le Fantasques could reach over 43 knots on trial, and 40+ knots at more realistic displacements. In formation, the ships could travel at 38-40 knots. "Raiding speed" was 38 knots. Combat speed was only 28 knots, a value where all the ships in the class had minimal vibration for gunnery. The other contre-torpilleurs appear to have been similar. The Vauquelins achieved a sustained speed of 37 to 39.5 knots at Normal displacement on trial, a formation speed of 37 knots, a "raiding speed" of 34 knots, and a combat speed of 30 or 31 knots. Again, the combat speed was intended to give steady gunnery.

I think it should be noted that other nations either did not find such a drop-off in their armors, or perhaps more simply did not think it much of an issue. The Americans used up to 439mm of Class A (face-hardened cemented) armor in the barbettes of the Iowas and South Dakotas, and up to 406mm for the barbettes of the North Carolinas. The barbettes of the Montanas would have reached 541mm of Class A, with the conning tower 457mm and the belt 406mm. For Japan, the Yamatos had a 410mm Vickers Hardened (VH, a cemented face-hardened armor) belt, 500mm VH main conning tower, 560mm VH barbettes (max), and 660mm VH turret face plates. The A-150 design supposedly would have yet heavier armor, but details are not available.

Is there a timeframe as to when Alpha 9 will be released?

Sounds great, but I fear that would be too much to add at this time. The team appears to be putting a lot of modeling effort into these prebuilt hulls. I would rather they use a customizable hull system, as suggested, but from the evidence I don't think the developers are very interested anymore. Still, this would be a cool approach.

I think another valuable piece could be stretching or breaking the treaty. For example, your "10000 ton"-limited cruiser might actually displace 11000 tons, or you might start building a new destroyer flotilla when forbidden by the treaty. Depending on their opinion of you, other nations might denounce you or otherwise become very mad if they figure out what's going on. Or they might shrug if off if they like you or it's really minor. Of course, maybe you might discover them cheating, too....

An interesting possibility would be player-influenced auto-generated treaties. Restrictions could be developed after a "treaty" event where the player provides input. The player and computer-led nations would be constrained by these values for a set amount of time, provided they signed said agreement. The computer should have a low chance to sign if a major potential enemy (eg the player) refuses to do so.

I don't think so, I believe that it's just an unusual computed dispersion value which shows up most obviously when a whole bunch of guns fire at once. I think there is no "interference", it's all baked into the accuracy stat.

Yes, there are a couple small reasons. When a gun shoots, it creates vibrations and a shock wave at the muzzle, which will disturb the trajectory of other shells in the vicinity. The guns in a triple or quad tend to be closer together than in a twin or several singles. The blast of one gun may therefore interfere with the others to a higher degree, if they are all fired at the same time. The shells might also collide or "kiss" midair, per US reports. This would be less likely if the shells started farther away from each other. These issues could be reduced with delay coils, so that the guns don't all fire at precisely the same time. This comes at the slight disadvantage that the ship is moving, so firing at slightly different points might theoretically reduce accuracy a little -- but overall this worked very well in practice, as fire control transmission had gotten very good. By WWII, most twin turrets also had delay coils, for the same reason. An alternative to delay coils is to fire half-salvoes. Only one or two of the guns in the turret would fire, and then after a time the other gun(s) would shoot a salvo. This would reduce interference. However, in certain turrets this would reduce rate of fire: in a turret where there is a fixed loading angle and the guns are locked together in elevation, the guns would have to wait for one another to fire before reloading. In a turret like on North Carolina, where there are delay coils, wide gun spacing, and independent elevation, probably there would be functionally little difference in accuracy against a twin.

3-5 inch guns were rarely carried in triple or quad mounts. There did exist some examples: The British BL Mark IX 4in/45 (101.6mm) in a three-gun mount. These were on battlecruisers and on a monitor. The French Modele 1932 130mm/45 (5.1in) in a quadruple turret. These were on battleships only. The Italian Model 1937 135mm/45 (5.3in) in a three-gun turret. These were on battleships only. Why small triple or quad mounts were not used otherwise, I can't say for certain, but I think there may be some clues. Sheer size and number are factors. It may simply be easier to fit several singles or twins into a given space rather than consolidating them into triples or quads -- or one might just use a bigger gun. Additionally, a hit that disables one lightly-armored mount may leave the others untouched, so having multiple separate ones might be prudent. The working area of the loaders imposes a restraint. Even if every other part of the mount scales ok, the human factors will not get much smaller. They need to stand somewhere. Common solutions were to have the loaders between the guns, or have the guns close together with the loaders behind / slightly outside. On the other hand.... One can see how terribly crowded the British 4in triple was; it was disliked. The Italian turrets had an undoubtedly cleaner ammunition supply, but they may still have been cramped. Triples and quads have a more complex ammunition supply than singles or even twins, in general. The French 130mm quadruple mount suffered here. Space, weight, and loading constraints were especially severe issues for dual-purpose guns. The French quad was a poor AA mounting due to the complexity of its systems. The British and Italian triple mounts were basically anti-suface only: the Italian triple 135s were indeed mounted alongside single 90mm mounts for AA defense. A single mount or dual mount can be made to traverse and elevate faster (or, at least, with greater ease), because they weigh less per mount rather than per gun. Since triples and quads became more popular as the air threat was developing, this was a disadvantage to those ships that carried them. Finally, there is cost. If all destroyers in the fleet use single or twin DP mounts, why not just standardize on them? No use in developing a triple or quad mount that won't even fit on a smaller ship. I don't know how the game should handle this. Perhaps there could be a further reload penalty to triples and quads of 3-5in.

Do you mean having the turrets / barbettes be different sizes for various numbers of guns?

I think I don't understand the proposal. How would it differ from the current system, where successive superstructures add bigger benefits?

The Japanese perspective was that each ship needed to be qualitatively better than its American counterpart, because the IJN would not be able to match the USN in numbers. Battleships were seen as the final arbitrators of sea power, so they would need to outgun the enemy. When designing the Yamato in the 1930s, the Japanese thought a 20in gun would be good because of its immense range, armor penetration, and destructive power. They believed that this would be vital in the theorized big gun Tsushima-type showdown between Japan and the US. But a gun this size would be very hard to make and might take a long time to appear. It was decided to use 18in instead on the Yamato, as this would still have a big qualitative advantage but would not be as troublesome to build. After the Yamato, proceeding designs would use a 20in gun. This way, if/when the US realized that the IJN had made the jump to 18in guns, any answering US 18in design would be overmatched by yet bigger guns. It was thus planned that the IJN would have a significant gun advantage until about 1950.

What a bizarre article. It has a lot of accurate information on the CA-B project, but then it goes off the rails and starts making unverified claims about weight and armor reductions. I sure wish there were sources posted. Pretty sure the first half of the essay is derived from Friedman's US Cruisers. The second half... looking at some of the other articles posted on that site, I think it's made up.

Concrete ships might be interesting, but there weren't very many of them. There were, I think, a fair number of concrete barges. I reckon both were vastly outnumbered by wood ships and boats. Either way, these concrete ships usually weren't warships, with the possible exceptions of special repair patches and AA barges and the like. Concrete ships were generally cheap merchant carriers. We can't build merchant ships right now. Fort Drum was not a ship, despite its appearance. It was a highly fortified island.

I do not exactly understand the Naval Ops system, so perhaps I am misinterpreting it. All-or-nothing does not depend on length of protected citadel relative to ship length. The first AON design, Nevada, had its citadel extend 400ft out of a waterline length of 575ft. This gives a protected percentage of about 69.6% of waterline. The following US Standard battleships were designed to meet this fixed protected waterline percentage, with the Colorados amounting to 68.6%. Additionally, heavy armor extended aft of the citadel proper, so as to cover the steering gear, so even more waterline space was protected than just the citadel. USS Nevada. One can see the great length of the citadel here. The steering gear armor covered approximately 80 feet, so total protected length was about 480ft/575ft = 83.48% of total waterline length. I am uncertain of the armor profile of the steering gear; Friedman seems to indicate it was a turtleback without a belt. By contrast, the Nelson class had an armored waterline percentage of only 58.6% (probably neglecting the steering gear box). The North Carolina had a lower percentage of armored length compared to the Nevada, but it appears to have been still substantial. The North Carolina. Later US AON designs partially abandoned these ideas of percent protected length. The South Dakota had a citadel 360ft long at a waterline length of 666ft, while the Iowa had a 464ft citadel at a waterline length of 860ft. This gives percentages of 54.04% and 53.95%, respectively. That said, the South Dakota and Iowa also had long steering gear belts that joined to the rear of the citadel, so protected waterline space was somewhat greater than these numbers suggest. Likewise, the actual volume percentage enclosed by armor was greater than might be assumed from length, as the ends of Iowas especially were very slim compared to the midships section. The Iowa. One can see the great length of the steering gear armor belt.

Thanks for the timestamps. I had already watched the video. I see the timestamps in the comments there, too. I was more wondering if the video's creator had posted a script somewhere -- he appears to be reading from one. This would make it easier to reference.

Is the a transcript available of the answers?

Well, the US, UK, and France used dyed shells, too. The Soviet Union at least experimented with them, and may have used them in general service. Not sure if Italy or Germany tried them. My understanding is that they were a rather late innovation. Difficult to dig up, but it appears they first started showing up about 1928 in the US and some years after that in the other navies -- 1936 in France, 1941 in Japan, and 1942 in the UK. A little unclear when the Soviets first started using them, but I think by about 1931. As for tracers, the US Navy used them on many shells for big guns. I am unsure when tracers were introduced, but I suspect from some time before WWI. Shells from the 20mm up through the 16in on battleships had tracers: all AP and the great majority of HE/HC and target shells were traced, although illuminating shells and some other specialty shells like smoke or Window were not. Some (not all) VT shells were also untraced. Big US guns had orange tracers. Small ones (~3-4in and less?) had red or white tracers. I don't know how visible they would be in daytime, but probably they would be hard to see at longer ranges. Japanese guns >40mm lacked tracers (at least about the 1930s-1940s), although there were experiments with big-gun tracers in 1937 and later in WWII. Therefore, this seems to have been a conscious decision to not use them. Light AA weapons like the 25mm naturally did have tracers. Don't know much about tracers in other navies, but they at least were used in 6in guns in the Royal Navy during WWII. Sources: Naval Firepower, Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War, French Cruisers 1922-1956, documents from the Naval Technical Mission to Japan, OP 4, and OP 1664

It is true that many destroyers carried no reload torpedoes, but a substantial number carried a partial or full set, too, as did some torpedo boats. For Japan, this included: The aforementioned Fubukis, and the Akatsukis, with 9 torpedo tubes and 18 total torpedoes (possibly reduced to 12 total after refit); The Hatsuharus, with 9 tubes and 18 total torpedoes, later reduced to 6 tubes and 12 torpedoes (and then later eliminated in favor of light AA guns); The Shiratsuyus, Asashios, Kageros, and Yugumos, with 8 tubes and 16 torpedoes: And the Akizukis, with 4 tubes and 8 torpedoes. The one-off Shimakaze had no reloads, likely as its total of 15 torpedoes was similar to the contemporary Yugumos. The older Japanese destroyers and torpedo boats may have had reloads, and I rather suspect some of them did, but sources are sparse. Most I can dig up is that the Mutsukis had 10 torpedoes for 6 tubes. I believe the big and unfortunate Tomozuru torpedo boats had reloads before the Incident, but I have no source to back this up. I don't think the Otoris, Matsus, or Tachibanas shipped reloads, but I have little evidence of this either. For the US, things were a little more mixed. For all the US torpedo boats: TB-1 and TB-2 do not appear to have carried reloads, although this is uncertain with their bow tubes. TB-3, TB-4, TB-5, and TB-8 carried a single reload torpedo along with three single tubes, for a total of four torpedoes. TB-6, TB-7, TB-9, and TB-10 had no reloads. TB-11 may have carried a single reload torpedo, along with two tubes; unclear. TB-12 through TB-18 had no reloads. TB-19 carried one reload each for its two single tubes, for a total of four torpedoes. TB-20, TB-21, TB-22, TB-24 through TB-32, and TB-35 are unknowns. I think most had no reloads. TB-23 was never armed. TB-33 and TB-34 had no reloads. For US destroyers to the Gearings: The Bainbridges and Trixtuns had a reload for each tube, with two tubes and four torpedoes. The Smiths had a reload for each tube, with three tubes and six reloads. The Pauldings, Cassins, Aylwins, O'Briens, Tuckers, Sampsons, Caldwells, Wickes, and Clemsons all had no reloads. However, their total number of torpedoes matched or exceeded their predecessors. The Farraguts likely had no reloads. The Porters had one reload per tube, with 8 tubes and 16 torpedoes. The Somers probably had no reloads, or at most perhaps 4 torpedoes for 12 tubes. The Mahans had racks for 4 reload torpedoes against their 12 tubes. They started a trend where reload racks were provided, but their weight was not counted, as a way of avoiding treaty weight limits. The 16 tube Gridleys, Bagleys, and Benhams probably had no reloads, but it is unclear. The Sims had 4 reload torpedoes for 12 tubes. Presumably the racks remained after the refit to 8 centerline tubes. The Benson-Gleaves and Fletchers had 4 reload torpedoes for 10 tubes. It appears this provision was eliminated sometime during WWII on most (if not all) units as weight compensation. The majority of Sumners and Gearings probably did not have any reloads as built. Later ASW refits would lead to tubes with reloads on some of the Fletchers, Sumners, and Gearings, but these appeared postwar. The WWII destroyer escorts do not appear to have had reloads. In general, I suspect extra torpedoes were considered a luxury in the US, and that they were replaced by radar, AA, and anti-submarine items as needed. In any event, there were not elaborate arrangements for reloading above water rotating tubes on interwar destroyers, as the Japanese used. Reloading would be slow. Sources are Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War, Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, US Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History, and NavSource.