akd

Warfare doesn’t work like that. Imperfect information is the norm, and dealing with it is part of tactics (and should be part of a wargame). Puzzle games give you complete information then ask you to find the perfect solution. On the specific issue of omniscient knowledge of enemy weapon status, it is particularly harmful to making a good wargame because it is information only the player can use.

They are not search devices, nor useful for that purpose. Until radar comes along, the primary means of search is Mk. I eyeball aided by binoculars (and as such there is not significant differences ability across the time frame or between nations. Look here for US Navy 1943 lookout manual: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/l/lookout-manual-1943.html It's really down to training, height of observation and visual conditions, nothing else.

I’m not so sure it even makes sense as a design choice, especially when you consider that in a campaign setting these are per ship / per ship class decisions, when ammunition and propellants really should be a fleet-wide development, or at least per gun of a particular type. I’m also not so sure that history really suggests there was ever much of a trade-off decision in selecting explosive fillers or propellants. When something better became available, it was generally used. I’d rather see propellants and explosive fillers as a fleet-wide unlock based on technological development level, a doctrine setting that determines how much of various ammo types are carried based on ship class and armament, and leave the individual ship design choice to things that affect the physical storage and handling of ammunition like shell length. Would much rather see those “slots” used for more choices in configuring fire control and propulsion on ships, which were crucial decisions at the ship design level.

The differences in visibility are grossly exaggerated in game currently, just as is the distance various ships can see with towers that are all of similar height. Visual detection should depend more on visual conditions and less on the object observed. That difference should play more of role around the margins of visual detection.

Here is a smokescreen created with chemical generator: https://ww2db.com/images/ship_hull10.jpg

The type of smokescreen pictured and discussed here was not made by a special generator, but by forcing incomplete combustion in the propulsion system which would cause reduction in power in exchange for thicker clouds of hot black smoke (which would rise and dissipate fairly quickly). As a consequence, any steam driven ship could make such a smokescreen.

I understand your point, but those are clearly destroyers.

Too much mixing of calibers. Doesn’t matter much currently, but hopefully will in the future.

I believe the probability shown is per shot, not salvo. 4% for a 10-gun salvo is, I think, 34%?

And the every navy of every nation in 1875 will be completely populated with these two ships or minor variations on them at game start? That will be a lame set of "legacy fleets." (In fact, even the 1890 start runs up pretty hard against this problem already).

Seydlitz made it home, if barely. But certainly ships in such a state should be much more crippled.

Since all turrets should have a small barbette or ring at the base, rather than having the armor resting directly on the deck, and an extension of this barbette or ring would not increase poly count (it is the same shape, just longer), I would think this is the ideal solution. Route of adding more and more barbettes to pick from to fit different designs and placements seems like a dead end where you will never get something that looks quite right but to satisfy player creativity a huge number of different parts to dig through in menu will be required.

More importantly, the advancements in gun and mounting research lead inevitably to turret mounting rather than improving casemates as turrets were a much better solution. Past a certain point, casemate research should be a dead end where any improvements are met by or exceeded by turret mountings. Would like to see casemates with a elevation / range limit regardless of gun tech level, but would also like to see secondary guns given realistic max ranges.

Some sub-set of shots landing closer together can still be part of a poor precision pattern. Again, there is no separate treatment of precision and accuracy in game, there is just “accuracy” with some accuracy factors tied to factors that would affect precision in real life (e.g. multiple gun in turret accuracy malus). There is only greater or lesser accuracy, and this is visually represented by increasing or decreasing dispersion patterns. This is also why stacking accuracy factors can lead to impossibly tight dispersion patterns. The dispersion is fake, not an actual ballistic calculation.

Remember that visual dispersion is used to represent both precision errors (pure dispersion) and accuracy errors. You will never see a tight pattern land away from a target due to a bad target solution. This makes it impossible to judge whether patterns are normal or not.

Here's another rough comparison just on the basis of pattern size: 5"/38 During the Okinawa campaign, so much 5"/38 ammunition was expended in such a short period of time that concerns were raised regarding excessive barrel wear. Two Fletcher class destroyers, USS Hall (DD-583) and USS Richard P. Leary (DD-664), the latter of which had expended about 4,270 rounds per gun, were ordered to perform an offset practice shoot to determine the effects of barrel wear on accuracy. The exercise found that the range patterns from USS Richard P. Leary were 260 yards at 6,000 yards (240 m at 5,500 m) and 470 yards at 12,000 yards (430 m at 11,000 m), which were both within the nominal accuracy specifications. vs 14"/50 mk7 he Mark 7 was a remanufactured 14"/50 (35.6 cm) Mark 4 with a smaller chamber, a shell centering cone, a single-slope band seat, uniform rifling and a tube locking ring. The Mark 11 was the Mark 7 with the addition of chromium plating to the bore. During the battleship modernization program of the 1930s, the 14"/50 (35.6 cm) Mark 11 was used to rearm the New Mexico and Tennessee Class Battleships, although the battleship Tennessee did not receive updated guns until 1942. The problems with dispersion experienced with the 14"/50 (35.6 cm) Mark 4 guns seem to have been corrected with these rebuilt weapons. At Surigao Strait, USS Tennessee (BB-43) and USS California (BB-44) reported pattern sizes of 300 to 400 yards (275 to 365 m) for six and nine gun salvos at 20,000 yards (18,300 m), which was not appreciably different than that achieved by the newer battleships during the war. vs 16"/50 at best possible performance (beyond capabilities of our era) As modernized in the 1980s, each turret carried a DR-810 radar that measured the muzzle velocity of each gun, which made it easier to predict the velocity of succeeding shots. Together with the Mark 160 FCS and better propellant consistency, these improvements made these weapons into the most accurate battleship-caliber guns ever made. For example, during test shoots off Crete in 1987, fifteen shells were fired from 34,000 yards (31,900 m), five from the right gun of each turret. The pattern size was 220 yards (200 m), 0.64% of the total range. 14 out of the 15 landed within 250 yards (230 m) of the center of the pattern and 8 were within 150 yards (140 m). Shell-to-shell dispersion was 123 yards (112 m), 0.36% of total range. That of course does not account for other elements of accuracy when actually engaging a moving target, e.g. the longer flight time to reach the same range of the smaller caliber shells.

The size difference is huge, like many orders of magnitude different than 6" v. 12" (and the actual test results would be for Mark I or Mark II equivalent guns). That said, the max range of lighter guns is being severely artificially limited in game, which may be skewing the accuracy fall off.

Mark 4 6" doubles have higher base accuracy at 10,000m than Mark 4 13" doubles. Makes no sense.

Good articles, but I disagree with the author's conclusion that the secondary battery on pre-dreadnoughts was there to deal with cruisers, while the primary battery dealt with battleships and the tertiary battery dealt with torpedo boats. Right up until the Dreadnought revolution, the secondary battery was considered just as important as the main in tackling anything during a day engagement up to and including battleships. There was not really a perceived range or damage potential between the "primary" and "secondary" battery (both had max ranges that far exceeded what was considered effective range, and QF guns were likely to rival big mains in terms of damage due to huge difference in rate of fire). I also think that using dye markers came about after the era of the mixed primary battery semi-dreadnought, so not sure why author commented on that in the mixed primary battery discussion.

RAMJB also raised very good point about the campaign in relation to judging whether or not systems and their relation to each other are either 1. balanced or 2. reflect the historical relationship between various factors that drove design (and therefore makes it interesting to try your own designs in a "historical sandbox" setting). All of these academy and custom missions are completely artificial and have very little to due with the decision making a ship designer faced. No ship designer was every told: "Make the perfect ship to counter 3 torpedo boats and an armoured cruiser that have design specs within these specific limits and will only appear in this very narrow set of conditions. Rest assured this is the only purpose this ship will ever be tasked with." These sort of artificial one-off challenges encourage players to min-max designs and punish those who simply attempt to insert a historical design into those circumstances, because the missions must in turn be "balanced" for the min-max design otherwise they will not provide challenge. They also lead to artificial mission goals that in turn drive false expectations about the performance of technology. The mission objective is to destroy X torpedo boats in Y time, so my goal should be to load my ship up with anti-torpedo boat armament to accomplish this, right? But then the mission is over and I have failed, even though not a single torpedo reached any of my ships and all the torpedo boats are trailing far behind in various states of disrepair completely impotent to pose any further threat. But they did not immediately sink and I lost the mission! Increase anti-torpedo boat gun accuracy and damage!

The problem is this is all predicated on a error. The problem is not the base accuracy or the penetration of light guns. The problem is with the gunnery model (which applies several negatives to accuracy to the most likely target for these guns that is completely independent of the actual gunnery solution problem, e.g. no regard for the fundamental difference between long range fire and point blank fire) and a damage model that completely distorts the historical relevance of attacking the majority of the ship that is unarmored or lightly armored by treating the ship itself as an armored box. Introducing additional errors in an attempt to patch these problems just layers more problems on top and sends you down the endless balance rabbit hole where multiple broken systems are interacting in implausible ways and each adjustment just adds a new error.

Last is burst gun from premature shell detonation?

Strategic, very limited operational (unless you are talking about real time code breaking for operational communications) Operational, very limited tactical tactical, operational when combined with airborne reconaissance You are placing things in a single "tree" that have completely different purposes and effects and operate at different scales of time and distance.

I believe casemates were generally limited to 15-20 degrees elevation at most, which was one of their big drawbacks as gun ranges increased.

Not being able to select ammo type separately might somewhat defeat giving different targets to secondary guns, unless auto selection works separately and intelligently.