WhoCares

They didn't interact very successful with fleet maneuvers., but not for the lack of trying. In preparation for plenty of fleet ops it was tried to put sub cordons outside enemy ports or near the area of operation in the likely path of the enemy. Like the sub sinking Yorktown after Midway was part of a force of 13 subs on station supporting the Midway operation, or American subs sinking some cruisers of the Japanese fleet on their way to Leyte Gulf. Also already for Jutland: But of course, they indeed played no role in the actual fleet battles. It was about wittling down the approaching enemy and/or picking of stragglers afterwards. In the heat of the battle you don't also want to have to worry about some random periscope sticking out in the vincinity of your ships, not knowing whether friend or foe...

I don't know where your numbers come from - Iowa and Yamato have a mast height of ~180ft (might be radio masts...). But using that value and putting it into a LoS calculator, I get a view range to the horizon of ~26.5km, mast to mast that would doubled, ~53km or about 28 nm. As for sound under water, that's a rather tricky one as well, especially comparing lateral sound distribution right under the surface relevant in the context of the game. Hearing enemy ships or torpedos with a hydrophone on a (fast moving?) surface vessel - good luck. A submerged submarine 50 or 100m down on the other hand, that's a whole different topic - and a different game, you might want to give the game "Cold Waters" a try.

Interesting that you mention the Gudalcanal campaign. Battle of Savo Island On the other hand... So in one battle examples of apparently somewhat blind American ships and good lookouts of the Japanese (suppoted by some back lighting). Especially in the early war the Japanese often managed to launch surprise torpedo attacks, even with heavy cruisers. That said, I still agree that the current spotting needs some work. I mean on one end I don't like the idea of a 200t TB popping up at <500m in the night, but at the same time I'd like to execute a torpedo ambush against an unaware enemy at night... At daytime I'd expect the spotting advantage on the bigger ship over the horizon. In the night the horizon is somewhat irrelevant and large silhouettes may stick out more when getting closer.

In fact most of the German cruisers in WW1 were armed with 10.5cm (4.1") guns, and were called "Kleiner Kreuzer" (small cruiser). Obviously they had more than one gun, more like 8 to 12, like the Gazelle class launched in 1900 up to the Graudenz class in 1914. The British had some similarly armed scout cruisers like the Active class,, but also mixed 6" (usually 2 guns) + many 4" and also pure 6" cruisers like in the Town class. Whether a 4" cruiser is competitive in the game conext in a 1900 or 1910 campaign is a different topic, and indeed at least dubious. With the generic CL classification and then match-up in battles, you will mostly do better with bigger guns and more armor - or a fast torpedo cruiser with a few token guns like Kitakami and Oi....

Don't know. Yesterday in a campaign battle I had a fight between TBs. My last TB was hit by a single 2" or 3" shell, which trigggered a fire that eventually burned down my whole TB 😢 Granted, that was with a crew full of trainees...

I had a batle with BB - CA - CL - 3x TB vs 3x CA - CL - 2x TB. Ended with my BB barely afloat, CA fine, and 2x TB still around for enemy 2 CA (mostly by my TBs) and CL sunk. Also had that visibility issue for the CLs and TB during the battle. Then I hovered my cursor over the icon next to the compass in the top right: night, bad weather, rough sea - well, that explained it. Wanted to add a screenshot, but after playing first a few Academy battles (all reset for me since I last played 😭) and then the campaign yesterday, it seems today I can' start another academy or even custom battle - I can only load into the campaign where a battle is waiting for me that I don't want to fight right now (I just wanted to get into a random battle to take a screenshot...). So I attached a screenshot from the custom battle screen that I have now - I can change the left nation and some options for it (year and range), but I can't change anything on the right, and hitting any other buttons does nothing, can't even cancel and go back to the main menu. Similar for the academy screen, I can select the available scenarios, can also choose the options (like better guns or more money), but can't enter the design phase - but at least I can still go back to the main menu... Could it be that this is because I have a mandatory battle pending in my campaign? Just speculating, I don't know...

Considering the timespan we have, there might also be shifts in focus and philosophies, like what's the characteristics of a BC, trading armor or fire power for speed, and such things.

In WW2 at least for the USA they had ship recognition charts, I guess other Navys had similar handbooks - like in Tora Tora Tora you see the Japanese pilots getting trained with similar silhouette drawings of American ships on cardboard. During peace-time it is not that difficult to get such information about the exteriors, as many major ship launches were prestigious public events, photographs freely available, and ports/docks rarely so isolated that you couldn't take a glimps and/or photographs. Not to mention many ships visited many foreign countries/ports in peace-time service. And you also see that the information is still "sketchy", like what the Japanese consider the Myoko class, as Myoko was first laid down, the US recognition chart calls Nachi class for the first ship launched; also with respect to tonnage etc. That's no longer possible in wartime, which would explain why the Japanese don't know about the escort carriers, or the Americans about the Yamatos. Fun fact - in TF1942 they used such a recognition chart as "copy protection" - you had to have the physical game handbook with such recognition drawings and identify a ship at the start of the game. Also in other games, especially U-Boat simulations like the Silent Hunter series, a proper ship identification with such charts is very important to properly estimate distance and speed, which is needed to plot target solutions.

Minor correction to the OP, the Spanish possession in Asia were the Philippines, not Indonesia (which were at that time the Dutch East Indies). The Spanish lost the Philippines to the USA as a result of the Spanish-American war. There was even a naval battle between a Spanish and American fleet in Manila Bay, where both fleets consisted of a number of protected cruisers and smaller vessels like gunboats, with many ships still mixed steam + sail ships - wonder how we substitute these, unprotected cruisers - do we have such?! But that already shows what kind of fleets are protecting distant possessions - it's not fleets of BBs and such, but cruisers and smaller vessels. Speaking about possessions, the USA didn't really have any such in Asia at that time, but still maintained an Asiatic Squadron operating out of a bay near Hong Kong - also going to be interesting to see how this is going to be handled in the campaign, maintaining some naval presence over a longer time in areas where you don't have colonies. I also wonder whether we need many more hulls and ship concepts - like I recently looked up the (Vichy-)French-Thai war, with the battle of Ko Chang, between a fleet with a French CL and some Avisos, which are DD sized ships with weaker armament, slower, but longer operating range, exactly designed for colonial service. On the other side there were Thai costal Defence ships, again DD sized, but 8" guns and short operating range...

You might also check out drachinifel's nice recent video on Range-finding and fire Control, and basically all other content on his channel if you want to dip further in naval warefare history - should keep you occupied and hopefully entertained for the next couple of weeks/months

Picking up on this third point, others already have said that it's not a good idea. What I think would be great instead, would be an indication at what range your own guns in your current configuration would penetrate your current armor config. For the guns we already have the range table that tells us how much standard(!!!) belt and deck armor they can pen at what range. However, that does not take into account bonusses from different types of armor, like +100% armor effectiveness for Krupp 4, and other bonusses like from the selected citadel. That means if a gun says it can pen 20" of armor at a certain range (and in that already reflecting your selected propellant, shell type, yadayada), 10" of Krupp 4 on the belt would be enough to protect you beyond that range against a ship with similar or weaker config. it would be nice if while changing the armor thickness, in a mouse-over we could see at which range our installed guns would pen that armor in our current config. That would help to design the armor layout in that way to create exactly such invulnerability windows as madham82 described it above for the Iowa. I try to do so already for some of the harder scenarios, but it requires a lot of back and forth checking and calculating (also with other guns), at least if I don't want to go completely beyond reason with the armor layout and safe me some weight for other components. It then also makes for interesting gameplay to get and stay inside that invulnerability zone - at least until the AI decides to throw 18" shells at my balanced design 🙄

Picking up these two questions/requests and expanding it a bit further. 1. Ability to save ship designs in a library/database, be it from Academy, Custom battle or Campaign. Maybe even in-battle generated AI designs, if we find them interesting. I can see the trouble with that option and balance changes in future patches, but as has been highlighted by others already, it's rather tedious to recreate the same design again and again. Maybe even the option to publicly share such designs by creating a hash that can be copied/loaded into the game. That might then also be something for the modding community, like people providing libs for ships or whole fleets. 2. Picking up Whomst'dve suggestion, having the library/DB from 1 would allow us to easily recreate the ships of the a specific battle and play it from the perspective of each of the participating ships => so much more replay value w/o the tedium to design the ship(s) again and again. 3. For generated design in custom battles, it would be good if we could at least somewhat further constraint the design limits. Maybe split it into a simple custom battle interface as we have it today, and a complex one that allows to restrict more specific stuff. Probably easiest would be just by tonnage - that's something that could already be supported by a little expansion of the current interface - just add a slider next to each class for the min-max tonnage. Beyond that would be the complex designer, like restricting interwar heavy cruisers to 8" guns, CLs max 6", no radar on 1930 ships, ... I can foresee that designing the interface for something like that might not be an easy task... and with 1+2, 3 might also allow to restrict the AI designs to ships in the library, if suitable designs are available. Could take that hash part from 1 even another step further and use it to distribute/load complete custom battle setups. The mod community would love that, create fleet libraries, and then share a series of battles as a user made campaign. But that's already thinking two or three steps ahead A library is the most urgent part in all this