akd
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Posts posted by akd
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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:
It's really down to training, height of observation and visual conditions, nothing else.
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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.
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Here is a smokescreen created with chemical generator:
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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.
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28 minutes ago, Skeksis said:
Ditto for BCs and CAs, it seems a detachment from realism.
US battleship off San Pedro steam away from the coast and throw a smoke screen in new tests of smoke screen producing fuels. 11 December 1926.
I understand your point, but those are clearly destroyers.
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Too much mixing of calibers. Doesn’t matter much currently, but hopefully will in the future.
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I believe the probability shown is per shot, not salvo. 4% for a 10-gun salvo is, I think, 34%?
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1 hour ago, Cptbarney said:
Yes you can.
And also turret ships were a part of the evolution process from turret ship > pre-dreadnought > dreadnought and so on.
The two most promenant examples being HMS Devastation (1871) and HMS Thunderer.
And no it wouldn't be overhauling the gun system would a huge drain on resources, your litterally making two new ship models.
jesus people really need to calm down.
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).
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Seydlitz made it home, if barely.
QuoteBy 15:30 on 1 June, Seydlitz was in critical condition; the bow was nearly completely submerged, and the only buoyancy that remained in the forward section of the ship was the broadside torpedo room. Preparations were being made to evacuate the wounded crew when a pair of pump steamers arrived on the scene. The ships were able to stabilize Seydlitz's flooding, and the ship managed to limp back to port. She reached the outer Jade river on the morning of 2 June, and on 3 June the ship entered Entrance III of the Wilhelmshaven Lock. At most, Seydlitz had been flooded by 5,308 tonnes (5,224 long tons) of water.[52]
But certainly ships in such a state should be much more crippled.
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54 minutes ago, Skeksis said:
Modeling-wise, each turret would have to have its extended barbette attach, so you could elevate it, and two tier high as you suggest. Turrets that are not elevated would still have its barbette attached and that barbette would be below the deck, hidden.
Taking all those 'hidden' barbettes into the battle instance would reduce rendering, not the render itself but at the beginning of the 3D pipeline that removes hidden polys, hidden barbettes, thus too taxing.
Current barbettes system is a WIP, and probably will be the best optimal rendering system at game release.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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31 minutes ago, Evil4Zerggin said:
Granted, the size difference between the guns was larger when I took these (5" vs. 18"), but the 5" also had a two Mark advantage. Here the 18" was 5.3 times more accurate at 5 km, and 60 (!) times more accurate at 10 km.
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.
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Mark 4 6" doubles have higher base accuracy at 10,000m than Mark 4 13" doubles. Makes no sense.
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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.
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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!
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3 hours ago, Skeksis said:
Alpha 1-2 showed us that secondaries and small calibre on light cruisers and destroyers was not effective enough to have reasonable impact on approaching light ships. They became pointless to include in ship designs, other than for aesthetic reasons, so forth the buff.
While Dev’s don’t always share their reasons for change, we can assume (from forum history) that this was one of the reasons for their buff in alpha III.
If Dev’s return to historical values then secondaries and light calibre will disappear again, since there usable resource would be better spent elsewhere, e.g. battleship armour. In a freedom of choice open world campaign only light ships carrying torpedoes would be viable and all light gunnery ships impractical.
Alpha 1- 2 ‘big gun game’ has happen, it will happen again, of cause this is Dev's choice, and Dev's choice to go full circle.
I just wanted to point out that some ‘compromises’ have their benefits and while some historical implementations have their disadvantages.
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.
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Last is burst gun from premature shell detonation?
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8 hours ago, Skeksis said:
e.g. 1890-1911+ spies
Strategic, very limited operational (unless you are talking about real time code breaking for operational communications)
8 hours ago, Skeksis said:, 1912-1934+ spotter planes
Operational, very limited tactical
8 hours ago, Skeksis said:, 1935-1940+ radar.
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.
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I believe casemates were generally limited to 15-20 degrees elevation at most, which was one of their big drawbacks as gun ranges increased.
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Not being able to select ammo type separately might somewhat defeat giving different targets to secondary guns, unless auto selection works separately and intelligently.
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>>>Combat Feedback<<<
in General Discussions
Posted · Edited by 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.