akd

A feature can represent tactical realities without being “real.”

Well, my real point was that although that is much simpler to implement, you end up with the same thing: a feature that is poorly connected to reality.

Experience with foreign tech (hulls and components) through building in foreign yards, acquiring plans via intel or just outright encountering foreign ships in war or peacetime should have a chance of allowing a nation access to different hulls and components other than those in their normal progression.

The problem is that you are proposing a huge amount of additional work for something that would gain no fidelity over simply selecting a box in the designer for “has floatplane” and extending the visual radius of the equipped ship in combat in good weather. This would come along with the same confusion and problems that simply extending ship visual LOS through radar has, but wouldn’t add a bunch of irrelevant fluff. Dogfights and damage from AA aren’t needed because that was not their intended (yet seldom used) tactical role. But even if they did play their intended tactical role as gunfire spotters, they did not simply extend the area a ship could see and target. Aircraft were very good at spotting for range (i.e. “short” or “over”) but not so good at spotting for deflection, so in practice a proper gunnery solution still required seeing the target from the ship’s own director position. Other issues: one aircraft could not spot for a fleet, but as it stands if anything sees a target, then everything can shoot at it.

Seems unintuitive and totally disconnected from reality. There would be no reason to fly the aircraft over the enemy, so why even bother with a visual representation or combat, especially since combat would be mostly irrelevant for their function. They weren’t used as frequently as you might think, so I would say just wait for something with higher fidelity in the future.

The 2-inch guns are clearly meant to be 6pdr / 57mm equivalents.

Of the same mark?

Yup, multiplayer would be cool if the objective was not symmetrical competition. Perhaps ability for humans to jump in on AI side in campaign battles?

I looked into total weight for shell + charge for 5” guns and it was still very far off.

Actually you can place both singe and double 7- and even 8-inch turrets in this forward position if they are the early Mark I style, but the transition from this early style turret to the very late-style sloped turret (would appear to be of post-WWI design) happens very early (e.g. 1898 for Russia in custom battle). It seems we are missing a more transitional design for these larger intermediate calibers, or perhaps the Mark I style turret should be retained for Mark II turrets (as it seems to be with the large main gun turrets). I did spot what appears to be a bug with the Borodino-class hulls, however: With these early Mark I turrets, you can place 7 or 8-inch doubles in the forward side position, but you can only place 7-inch turrets in the rear side position. With 8-inch selected, no mounting point appears and it doesn't even allow you to attempt to place it at that position. It will only snap down to the lower stern main turret deck. This would not appear to be size-based since with the Mark II turrets, you can place 7-inch turrets in the rear side position (which has more clearance from the rear main turret), but you can only place 6-inch turrets in the forward side position.

I would look to Operation Albion for ideas about how to develop interesting maps that involve restricted coastal waters. Some elements are crucial, however: shoal waters, mines, and land batteries. Also important to have targeting depend on LOS (or to some degree, line of radar) from firing ship to target, otherwise you will have nonsense like cruising behind land masses while destroyers dart about acting like remote director control towers* (already an issue, but exacerbated when direct approach is blocked). *I am aware of HMS Canopus firing on Von Spee's squadron from behind a hill, but she was grounded and essentially acting as a land battery with arrangements made for remote spotting from direct telephone connection to an observation post.

?? Ford Rangekeeper computer. Basic system with modifications stayed in use for controlling gunfire aboard Iowa until 1991.

As long as OOBs aren’t tailored by the player on a per engagement basis (especially if these are going to tell you ahead of time exactly what you are facing, but hopefully that will not be the case), heading in this direction would be great. Give the player control of operational organization and doctrine, and let both influence, but not make overly predictable, tactical engagements.

Except Nelson was absolutely not fighting for independence. “By Land, By Sea” is a good subtitle for Ultimate Admiral, and “Admiral” is good family name for the first tactical game to even attempt to properly depict the interrelated nature of land and sea operations. If anything, the game still somewhat trivializes the difficulty of command in this area. Way too easy to sail ships right up to the coast and disgorge troops under the guns of a fort. Battles that are land only are fine as well as long as there is a direct connection to the sea campaign and they are not just stuck in as filler.

Yes, and it is relative to your current angle and distance. (The angle next to ricochet is the offset from being directly to the side). The thinner line that extends somewhat above the deck and overlaps superstructure is the deck armor (which change relative strength only with distance, not the relative angle between ships.

In 1941, Lord Fraser, Controller of the Navy, requested a design study of a hybrid carrier based on the Lion-class hull: Pretty sure that is the 1941 equivalent of “that’s effing stupid dude.”

Lot's of anecdotes in this thread: https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=162349

I recently found, and have very much been enjoying, this naval history blog (with some naval wargaming content, also): https://www.navalgazing.net/Naval-Gazing-Index Distills a lot of the information in the various hefty reference texts listed above into shorter, easy to digest articles. Given our focus here, you might start with this series: https://www.navalgazing.net/So-You-Want-to-Build-a-Battleship-Strategic-Background

There was further integration and improvement to "concentration fire" (more than one ship firing on the same target) and distribution of fire both through dedicated fire control channels and ability to integrate this information into computers, but this is very late in the era. But prior to that there were some other rudimentary aids other than dye marker shells to coordinating fire and firing solutions. Range clocks facing to the rear allowed the next ship in line to see what range the preceding ship was firing to, and bearing marks on rear turrets allowed the same for bearing. Note that all of this was at best within a single division of ships. Far cry from how things are in the game were a single destroyer can play spotter for an entire fleet firing on an opposing fleet. French actually developed the dye markers in the interwar period, IIRC. range clock turret bearing marks

It is interesting to note that the above seems to be a problem we are experiencing in game, where possibly only certain tubes of a multiple launcher are able to fire at a given moment, messing up the ability to fire spreads. Also, here is a good discussion on fixed tubes: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/alltheworldsbattlecruisers/submerged-torpedo-tubes-on-battleships-t768.html

Gyro angles were certainly used on MTBs, and I'd be very surprised to learn they were never used to control spreads of torpedoes from other surface combatants. You are taking the historical determinism approach (e.g. this didn't happen in WWII so it should simply be excluded entirely), where I think it is better to look at the possibilities of the technology and game it out, because the circumstances of your war might be radically different than what developed historically. If using gyro angles incurred both advantages and disadvantages, model both and let us game it out. https://eugeneleeslover.com/USNAVY/CHAPTER-27-B.html https://maritime.org/doc/pt/doctrine/part4.htm I'm also fairly certain that not all submerged tubes were trainable and use of gyro angles was the only means of aiming these.

I would replace this with better feedback on what is happening with your torpedoes and more realistic torpedo systems, not increased micro management. Some of that would depend on having a crew / morale system implemented. One thing I think people don't understand is that the range ring for torpedo is the the simple mechanical range of the torpedoes. Their range against any target other than a stationary ship is actually dynamic, and this needs to be communicated better somehow.

Other than the penetration and flooding nonsense introduced with latest build, this is not true. The AI operates under the same mechanics as the player, and in fact if you want you can just turn the AI on for all your ships and watch what plays out. These sorts of impressions arise from confirmation bias where the negative events you suffer are given much more prominence in recall than the negatives you inflict on the AI or the AI's own failures. No, assuming that your own ships are not as damaged, then it is at least a minor tactical victory. All or nothing win conditions are bad and will drive us to adopting very artificial mechanics and AI behavior.

Brits may have eschewed using gyros on surface torpedos, but the US Navy pursued it and in fact intended that the entire torpedo battery of a destroyer could be launched together and curved ahead at a single target: https://books.google.com/books?id=YvHGDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT613&lpg=PT613&dq=US+navy+torpedo+gyro+ahead+fire&source=bl&ots=LMyzJrc7Sz&sig=ACfU3U3lRd5x8-s0qn54naTOua-vhvGQVA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjhp72Ri_nmAhXLLc0KHSOjA-AQ6AEwDXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=US navy torpedo gyro ahead fire&f=false

There are two problems that we already dealt with when 6" guns were allowed on destroyers: 1. The AI was hugely prone to picking them, so 6" became the norm rather than extremely rare as it was in reality (other than on some destroyers that were borderline light cruisers). 2. The current system of gun mounting does not account for the particularities of the hull it is mounted on: mounting a 6-inch gun on destroyer would have a much greater effect on total weight than mounting the same on a battleship. The hull would require substantial and costly reinforcement that would exponentially increase the weight of the installation. Ammunition handling and hand-training a 6-inch gun on destroyer would become nearly impossible in adverse conditions where at the same time a battleship installation might only be moderately effected. That said, I do find many gun mounting restrictions arbitrary and unnecessarily constraining to design choice. For example, on all the light cruiser hulls, you can mount 4-inch and greater pedestal or turreted guns, you can mount 2 or 3-inch casemate guns, but you can't place a 2 or 3-inch pedestal gun anywhere on the hull because it is not selectable under main guns (probably to keep the AI from selecting these as mains), but there are not secondary options except for the hugely limited casemates. This funnels you into a much narrower selection of armament than would otherwise be both feasible and reflective of what was done on the direct historical counterparts of these hulls. With some proper scaling of effects and downsides for various hulls, I would also like to see things opened up even further as you suggest.