DougToss

I have no doubt from reading some of Brown’s assessments of WW1 and WW2 damage that ships could take tremendous punishment and remain afloat. It’s just that there is a huge gradation before actually physically sinking beneath the waves we’re missing such as breaking contact, retreating, limping away, getting under tow, abandoning ship etc. A ship that’s been 92% damaged, whatever we consider that to mean, is having a very bad day and is not going to stick around as if nothing has happened. For all intents and purposes, that ship’s war is over - at least until it gets major time in drydock, if not just outright scrapped. There’s got to be a way to reward the player accordingly. We talk a lot about the campaign layer, but the best way to not break the campaign by having wildly inflated sinking numbers, and breaking tactical battles by having dramatically unrealistic and fatal weapons is to have something that considers a ship that damaged “lost”, as far as that engagement’s fighting goes. Maybe just a better way for the AI to turn tail and run when critical systems are damaged, or if the engagement seems un winnable or unwise anyways. I think it some ways Bismarck's last battle demonstrates a lot of that - I can only describe it as an execution by breaking at the wheel. The ship was lost long before it was sunk, but was unable to escape, nor did it (could it?) surrender. I think I read that the conning tower reportedly resembled swiss cheese. Either way, the battle was over long before Bismarck sank - insofar as there was no possibility of offering resistance. e: Ballentine apparently wrote an article on the issue: And this brings us to the key element of controversy that ‘Killing the Bismarck’ presents, namely the contention that some of her crew tried to surrender at the height of the battle. When the hardback edition was published, and the surrender angle received national newspaper coverage, this caused outrage - from the USA and UK to Poland - among the ranks of those who still believe in the ‘invincible Bismarck’ myth. One thing I have learned over the past decade or more I have been writing naval history books is that the accepted view of how events happened collapses, or at least can sometimes prove open to question, when you go deep into the archives. People are perhaps just not looking for it, or they possibly find something but it does not agree with the line they are pursuing, so they ignore it. With specific regard to the Bismarck Action I came across the ‘surrender’ claims in three different ways. In the case of one I found an account (by a Rodney officer) in the archives of the HMS Rodney Association. In another I wrote to the son of the man involved (a rating in Rodney) and he volunteered transcripts and sound recordings. The third account, from a sailor in the cruiser HMS Dorsetshire, was in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. The signs that these men saw included a man sending a signal via semaphore, mysterious light signals and a flag raised that seemed to indicate a desire to ‘parley’. I don’t see why these men would lie. I believe they saw some of Bismarck’s men trying desperately to surrender under a devastating weight of fire from two British battleships and a pair of heavy cruisers. In the fore part of the Bismarck, the British shell hits soon slaughtered hundreds of men and potentially killed the entire command team. The British sailors I quote were in a very good position to see what was happening. They were in actions stations with an excellent view of the enemy and certainly in Rodney’s case they had high-powered optics and could see with shocking clarity what was happening. I don’t think people realize just how close Rodney was in the final moments. The men who were best able to see what was happening in the fore part of Bismarck were sailors in British warships, not German survivors. The latter mainly came from well-protected engineering spaces deep within the citadel or served in the equally robust main armament turrets aft. Was it possible for the British to take Bismarck’s surrender? No. Some sailors may have been trying to surrender in the fore part of the ship, but their shipmates elsewhere continued to fire on the British. Was it an attempt to surrender on authorization of the Bismarck’s commanders, or just an initiative by some sailors who understandably wanted the killing to stop? Nobody will ever know for sure. No battleship deep in the heat of action has taken the surrender of another, at least not since the end of the wooden walls. Yes, there was an incident of Russian battleships surrendering at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 – but a radically different set of circumstances, so different as to be incomparable. With the Luftwaffe expected to send 200 bombers over the horizon at any moment, U-boats lurking in the area, with the Royal Navy’s ships running out of fuel – never mind the technical impossibility of putting a tow across – to have attempted to take the surrender would have been insanity. The Rodney and King George V were two very important capital ships. The British didn’t have many and the Royal Navy was in May 1941 taking a hammering in the Mediterranean during the Battle of Crete. Bismarck’s sister battleship, Tirpitz, was expected to set sail from the Baltic at any moment while there were other German high seas raiders lurking in Brest, waiting to come out and savage Allied shipping. To risk King George V and Rodney in such a mad move would have been a gigantic strategic error, putting Britain at risk. Bismarck’s ensign continued to fly, she was still firing and for the sake of Britain’s security she had to be destroyed as a fighting entity. After the guns ceased firing on both sides – and it’s worth pointing out the Bismarck’s guns did not fall silent until the British put them out of action - it was a different matter. The brotherhood of the sea saw the hand of mercy extended. This is something reflected on by some of HMS Dorsetshire’s sailors in the paperback edition of ‘Killing the Bismarck’ as their vessel rescued the majority of the 115 Bismarck men plucked from the sea. ‘When we went to pick up survivors, we did so because they were seamen doing their job of work, just like us,’ said George Bell, who was a teenage sailor aboard the British cruiser. ‘We had done our job, which was to sink the Bismarck and so now we offered them mercy.’ The most controversial element of the fresh material in the paperback edition of ‘Killing the Bismarck’ is, though, an account by an aviator who took part in the May 26, 1941 attack on the German battleship that fatally damaged her steering. Terry Goddard was a young Observer in a Swordfish of 818 Naval Air Squadron. Until he got in touch with me I thought John Moffat was the only living veteran of that crucial episode. Terry, who is now in his mid-nineties, read the hardback edition of ‘Killing the Bismarck’ and then e-mailed me. Subsequently, over a period of about two years, we had a to and fro discussion. He offered me an account he had written of his part in that mission against Bismarck, which he and I then tweaked and polished in order to present it as the headline element of new material in the paperback. It makes for a fascinating, sometimes justly acerbic but never less than passionate, analysis of what Terry feels really happened. It does contradict some recent claims about whose Swordfish torpedo did the fatal damage to the German battleship. History is organic, and ever evolving, with fresh perspectives to be discovered even now more than 70 years on from the Bismarck Action. I was also pleased to be able to present fresh material from another surviving veteran, who back in May 1941 made a transatlantic passage in Rodney as a 17-year-old midshipman. The new material in the paperback also contains a blow-by-blow account freshly rediscovered by the son of a Royal Marine officer who served in the gunnery director position of the cruiser Norfo

If you think of the 2D map as being an abstraction for the flag plot, signallers and subordinates relaying information, I think on the balance it’s good to have. The players have aids that real officers didn’t have because all of the other information available can’t be experienced through the PC.

Even if a ship remained afloat, it would surely have been rendered hors d’combat and struck its colours, right?

No, no I appreciate it. Chapter 9, “The Long Calm Lee of Trafalgar” in Rules of the Game gives it a thorough treatment. Book’s on libgen if you’re so inclined. I’m curious what you think since all of the points you touch on are there.

That’s just it eh? Incredibly highly trained, but did that training in things like drill, seamanship and sail management help?

The Victorian Royal Navy insisting on using sail training for decades longer than it should gets a chapter of its own in Rules Of The Game, maybe there’s something to it. Help me work this out into gameplay terms, but something like - Training on old ships and with old methods gives you a spit and polish peacetime navy - higher prestige, higher discipline, better ship maintenance, but does not increase (maybe even harms) wartime effectiveness?

I’m in the testing forum, I run it several times before every new version comes out. If your problem with the feedback is that there aren’t enough illustrations, there’s nothing I can do for you. Am I supposed to draw you pictures so you can follow along? I welcome you to argue on merits (“credibility”), because I consistently post qualitative and quantitive data from primary, secondary and academic sources. What about any of that do you find incredible? What data sets do you object to? Is there any analysis that you think is askew? If you have a hard time keeping up, feel free to sit out the conversations.

I bought it as soon as it was available you petulant child.

Lol what?

Naval enthusiasts follow (enthusiastic about) naval game that uses word “Realistic” 13 times in blog entry describing intended battle system, news at 11. 😢🎻 You just finished throwing a fit, so we don’t need to rehash this, but how you handle the feedback is more disruptive than the feedback itself. As you alluded to, you haven’t tried to dispute any of the arguments on merit, but instead complain that knowledge is being demonstrated at all. While I understand that it must be frustrating to feel left out of a conversation, or like you are being talked over, people have very helpfully listed their sources. They have given you the tools you need to participate in the discussion time and time again, and instead of using them so you can engage with the material, you complain that the conversation is being had in the first place. You can see how this is not conducive to getting on the same page. So - feel free to ignore naval discussion if it’s not your cup of tea, but it’s absurd to pretend it’s not relevant - I’d say more relevant, but I’m biased - feedback to a naval game.

I think it’s more that neither was very accurate but the threat of either was a huge consideration. I could be misreading that though. Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations really examines torpedo usage and effectiveness, but I’m not sure the best way to summarize the argument in a way that is good feedback for UA:D: “The purpose of these ships was to influence the main action: to force the enemy to turn or, if he did not, to cripple him with torpedoes. In battle, destroyers were treated as mad dogs on the leash of the destroyer flotilla commander. The fleet commander’s practical control of them was limited to commands like “go” and “come.” Their role was to rush in a tight pack and seize a battleship’s throat if they could or, as was more likely, to leap and claw and growl at the enemy’s own mad dogs, which had also charged into the fray at a single word from their master. If a destroyer were impaled on a battleship’s bow and sunk, it was a scarcely mourned impediment to the battleship’s effectiveness. If one were caught in the crossfire between battle lines, it may as well have been invisible. But a squadron of destroyers, bows-on with a bone in their teeth, was a very visible and chilling threat indeed. A destroyer squadron commander fought for a semblance of order, living in the chaos of neglect by friends and spreading chaos among enemies as he was able. The peacetime tactician’s picture of the destroyers is represented in figure 3-5, and the wartime tactician’s picture is in figure 3-6. Even the latter is really more like a spectator’s view from the grandstand than a player’s view, which is besmeared with smoke, confusion, noise, and fear.” “If all this disorder was inevitable, what good were precise mathematical calculations about weapon effectiveness? The answer hinged on what the fleet commander needed to know—some rough relationships between range and hitting effectiveness (e.g., when a torpedo-launching vehicle was a threat to the force) and how the range was figured. Some of the finest analytical thinking of the time on this subject seems to have been done at the Italian naval academy, judging from the writing of Romeo Bernotti and Guiseppe Fioravanzo. Bernotti’s calculations of torpedo effectiveness in battle are a good single example of how astutely tactical quantitative theory and practical considerations were blended from 1890 to 1915. Bernotti treated in detail a thirty-one-knot torpedo with a running range of 6,500 meters and a maximum speed of fifty knots.16 To dispense with the simple-minded notion that raw running range was a significant tactical parameter, Bernotti ran through twelve pages of precise, concise, analytical, geometric, and probabilistic calculations of torpedo effectiveness, footnoting as he was able with Russian experimental results. Having calculated the effective range of a single torpedo against a non-maneuvering two-hundred-meter target from different directions, he showed the mathematical advantage of firing from off the target’s bow. Next he calculated the threat of a spread of five aimed torpedoes against a single target and of an unaimed spread against a battle line. He concluded that from the defense’s point of view, outside of 3,500 meters—that is, half the running range—“there is no occasion to trouble oneself very much about it” even though there was a perceptible risk; and from the offense’s perspective, it was “well not to sacrifice, even to a minimum degree, the [effective] employment of the gun” On torpedo-boat tactics, Bernotti argued for attacks by successive squadrons of three and demonstrated both the power of simultaneous torpedo launch and how to achieve it. He conceded that a coordinated attack is difficult in battle, but he showed that single-ship attacks in sequence brought with them scant probability of individual success. Bernotti’s derivation of what seems today like point-blank range stemmed from a tactical philosophy that returns to haunt every commander planning a modern missile attack: “A weapon, the action of which cannot be repeated except at considerable intervals of time, and of which the supply is very limited, must be employed only under conditions that assure notable probability of hitting”. Today’s missile battle will center on keeping the enemy uncertain of his target and its position. Once launched, missiles cannot be recalled, and empty magazines can quickly become a terrible reality. Will effective missile-firing ranges be shorter than their maximum ranges? Finding out is essential, judging from the Israeli and Egyptian experience in the 1973 war. The missiles of the Egyptian warships outranged those of the Israeli warships. But the Israelis induced the Egyptians to fire all their missiles ineffectually—and then closed in for a devastating finale.” All of that to say, it’s *really* hard to account for Torpedoes being simultaneous incredibly dangerous *and* not often very effective.

If I remember confused splashes aren’t modelled yet, but it goes without saying an 8 inch secondary battery would have a host of problems, that displacement would have been better used to protect or propel the ship. 10 8 inch guns that could have been better used on a cruiser and would make the main battery gunnery worse - hence the Dreadnought in the first place - is better than what we have seen, but by no means good.

Attaching this postscript at the end of a disjointed missive railing against the people most actively working to provide feedback on core mechanics is a strange choice. You don’t seem to grasp that improvements to core mechanics would impose - to borrow from you - “realism”, that naturally creates limitations. Mostly though, you seem to be misrepresenting the argument - Higher fidelity allows for a ship builder that allows for the recreation of what was historical, and, rooted in that reality, what was possible. Right now, it does neither.

Lol I’m sorry but: 1) How is this person not banned? 2) They can change thread titles at will? 3) “Off Topic” is very generous.

That’s a really, really good point - every naval history I read trying to get to the bottom of the secondary armament issue agrees with you! Like modelling the fear caused by a wall of ineffective fire splashing all around you in a torpedo craft, I don’t know how to show the panic that gripped the world around torpedoes from 1880-19XX. The problem with both is making them as effective as people feared they would be, and acted as if they were, severely breaks the game because it’s trying to get to the psychological and decision making consequences (break off contact, equip secondaries, worry about torpedo attack) as a result of practical effect, rather than its own phenomenon. How do you make the player and AI scared of these things without actually making them a disproportionate threat?

I think because that was the last effort by a major publisher, wasn’t it? It took sub sims by smaller devs a long time to catch up to where Silent Hunter was when Ubisoft dropped the title. I think the revival of Microprose will go a long way towards changing that. Their slate of games now may not have been possible by indie studios on their own.

Lol I wonder It goes without saying that Croatia’s own brush with that ideology was soaked in blood and human misery, which makes your own prattling even more repulsive.

Well that’s just it! The debate about secondaries within the Royal Navy from ~1890 was “How do we keep torpedo craft out of torpedo range?” They discovered from the very earliest tests that they could not (reliably) expect to hit torpedo craft before they were able to fire their torpedoes, and even then, couldn’t sink them. The problem grew and grew as torpedoes got better and their range got longer. A single lucky torpedo could sink a major warship and disrupt the whole battle line. Something needed to be done, and there seemed no way at all to keep these small boats from throwing off the whole balance of power. To paraphrase the IRA to Margaret Thatcher “You need to be lucky every single time. We only need to be lucky once.” And yet Very few major surface combatants were sunk by torpedos, few of those were undamaged and able to fully manoeuvre, and torpedos were never the decisive part of the fleet engagement that had been feared from their inception. They should have devastated battle lines - in theory. The breakdown as you said is the human element - you are asking someone to maintain a steady course and speed into the teeth of a battle line to get a torpedo firing solution! It doesn’t matter if those shells have a 2% chance to hit, and 2 and 4 inch guns are unlikely to outright sink your 200 tn torpedo craft in a single hit. Absolutely no way you are going to plough on through. I’m not sure how to model that. I think other naval sims have ships under fire take longer to engage with torpedoes, or break off their attacks, but I’d have to check. In short we need a way to show how scary even theoretically ineffective fire is.

Thank you.

Lol cancel culture is when you condemn naziism, “a logical and different worldview”.

I’m amazed he hasn’t been banned yet for the overt Third Reich apologia. Maybe he hasn’t been reported yet?

Large displacements mask the problems with the weight, distribution, efficiency and effectiveness of machinery, protection, firepower and fire control.

Also, as always, historically the point of secondary armaments was not to protect warships singlehanded - they very rarely (1-3%) hit, and when they did, did not sink small torpedo craft, but rather acted as a deterrent.

It’s not about the designs, it’s about the underlying systems.

The word Fascist comes from a bundle of sticks tied together, Fasces. Another word for a bundle of sticks tied together is Fagot. hello kitty off and waste somebody else’s time.