DocHawkeye

No. You are saying that. I have made an attempt to correct your misunderstanding and will go no further than that since it is difficult to discern if you are in fact confused or just engaging in bad faith argumentation. You have failed to engage with one single point i've made other than the TDS issue which you are either unable or unwilling get past. I no longer care which. I would like it very much if you would leave the topic please. You are being disruptive.

I like RTW but it's a good example to highlight how problematic the ship-designer stuff can become. You generally don't see really outrageous or exploitive stuff in RTW but that's because the ship-designer is so nerfed. Wanna design a Panzerschiffe? Good luck because the game is going to classify it as a BC and then hit you with artificial penalties left and right for turret configurations and protection... RTW chose to heavily penalize out-of-class-parameter conditions in order to prevent the normalization of really egregiously weird designs. I think that was a necessary solution but then it sort of asks why they bothered with a ship designer at all.

I think you're having an issue processing what I mean by point of pivot which is an irresponsible jargon on my part. Airplanes were a new consideration for Battleship design heading into the post-Great War decades is what I mean by this. The TDS could be a concession of precious weight allowance to the airplane as it was to the submarine in this time. It could be a consideration of plunging shell fire. It could be here for lots of reasons, not just gunfire. The threat posed by the torpedo-carrying Destroyer and Torpedo-Boat were easy enough to solve by just increasing battle ranges outside the effective range of torpedo craft, so unless you're charging into the effective range of escorts...you shouldn't be losing any ships to torpedo attacks. If the game is spawning you inside that range then I get how that keeps happening, and why the impression it leaves would be misleading. The issue with the airplane was that it could place its torpedo just about right into the side of an enemy ship. The issue with the submarine was that it could avoid detection. Can I trace the emergence of Torpedo Belts directly to these causes? Nope. Sorry. No one can. It is just rather conspicuous that such a system emerged in the 1920s when the airplane and submarine had both achieved hitherto unheard of prominence in the thinking as evidenced by the salient topics of the subsequent Washington Naval Conference... They aren't yet. They lack the necessary kind of variety opposition to justify much of their design criteria however, and as I've been saying; this lends them, potentially, to problems. Incidentally this is not what I said. I did not say that the TDS had *more* to do with the submarine. I said it was an angle. I'm engaging a bit deliberately here in abstraction because the fact is there was no single weight navies were using to justify the thinking behind a TDS in their ships. It was all highly generalized. The general lesson was the need to set aside a certain weight of tonnage and subdivision for defense from the new kinds of torpedo craft which the variety had increased to a frightening degree and their performance was rapidly improving. This is not reassuring skekSil...

Bingo. There's a lot of design features appearing in the game, like the DP gun...that have only half their context so far. I have no problem with the Fast Battleship being in the game, but i'm concerned that without the need to consider the threat environments they were planned to exist in they'll become a balancing nightmare. Think about all of the tonnage, form drag, and complexity involved with new Torpedo Defense Systems that became standard on the Fast Battleship. This system in fact became so necessary that it became compulsive to retrofit onto old Battleships. I've left out an important angle here in the need to consider the tangible impact the submarine was having on future warship design. If you have nothing to fear from these threats (because they don't exist in the game) would you ever waste tonnage on such a system? That will be sub-optimal play. Will it be possible to put 500 Director-Controlled DP mounts on Iowa and trololololol DDs and Light Cruisers to death? Will you be able to burn a KGV to death in two salvos by exploiting RNG rolls? Better yet. Will you be able to put seven 4-gun 20in turrets on Yamato because you don't need to use secondary mounts? Do we want to see things in this game like "Legging"? How about "Munchkins" and "LRM Camping?" The ship-builder potentially lends itself to the creation of endlessly self-perpetuating balance problems and it's my own suspicion that the likely point of emergence of these issues will be at the endpoints of the game's narrative focus because there won't be enough context to justify certain kinds of "sub-optimal" play styles. If anyone can reassure me that this will not happen i'd like them to try.

Hood is an interesting example here because she was extensively modified during her career to accommodate an anti-aircraft configuration that was not originally planned for. One might call that a major design concession especially considering the consequences that change had on what was otherwise a perfectly sound protection scheme for the ship. Whether designed keel up or not the airplane was having an influence on design, the Americans also felt compelled to conduct expensive rebuilds of the Standard Type Battleships part of which was influenced by the need to improve their minimal anti-aircraft defenses. (Admittedly much of this was done to accommodate newer propulsion plants, but those weight savings were then spent on...torpedo blisters and anti aircraft guns.) I heard that carriers are planned, but that work won't commence on them until after release. This is totally understandable. Aircraft carriers are a huge scope shift for a game focused on Dreadnoughts. They introduce a meta-layer to that game that could be majorly disruptive without proper abstraction, and I wouldn't mind seeing them put off entirely into another game although I don't necessarily think that's required.

Castles of Steel should be read with a lot of scrutiny, it leaves out heaps of the war and makes numerous errors in descriptions of German ships. Massie tries too hard to fit personalities and figures in the Royal Navy into an over-simplistic Manichean tale of smart, competent, 'good' men challenged to do a better job prosecuting the war or even sabotaged by dastardly self-promoting egotists. The Kaiser is portrayed like a cynical cartoon villain, and the German Navy's conduct is always cast under this salacious light. He valorizes John Jellicoe too much, and looks for every opportunity to mock the details of David Beatty's personal life like a school-yard bully. It's not badly written per se, but it's really unprofessional. Fighting the Great War at Sea is a far better alternative.

At one point or another the Americans engaged in a serious design study as to the feasibility of a Torpedo Battleship as attached. Oh dear....

So i'm really looking forward to the game's full release, and have already been pleasantly surprised by a lot of the game's features. The ship designer especially, normally a major weak-point in these games, was clearly planned out by someone who's done some major homework on the subject. Just about every major soft and hard factor impacting warship design from a statistical standpoint has been accounted for and that's great. When this game is released it's already in shape to be a good alternative to its competitors in the Naval-Wargaming world (which there are admittedly few of.) However, some ships and vessels make no sense in the context of the game. Ironclads and Fast Battleships particularly were vessels that sat at endpoints of the trends in warship design of their respective age, and were heavily influenced by the context of factors that are, -presently- outside the scope of the game. Ironclad warship design was predicted on an era in which few actual Ironclads existed, and most ships in most navies were still sail driven or maybe steam/sail hybrid. Some Navies even planned on using towed Ironclad-batteries just parking them in front of enemy coastal forts and bombarding them to death. But so far the only plan I see for Ironclads in based on the tired Hampton Roads cliche of a battle which was A. highly abnormal and B. wasn't planned for. On the other end of the spectrum we have Fast Battleships...but many elements of Fast Battleship design were predicated on concession to the airplane which had been accepted as a new point of pivot in warship design prior to the end of the First World War. I'm a bit less miffed on this one because Carriers are planned for the game...but why do airplanes need to necessarily co-exist with the aircraft carrier? Many Navies explicitly perceived coastal aviation as the particular threat in mind, especially the Mediterranean powers. It is little known even today that the 1st generation of anti-aircraft defenses that appeared on ships were designed for defeating the Zeppelins, airship, and spotting balloon of which a great variety existed. Thus the emergence of anti-aircraft defense on ships emerged at a much earlier date than is often thought of (conventionally believed to be the 1920s), and in some ways reflected no clear break from weaponry designed to fend off the much-feared Torpedo Boat. The mid-point of the Dreadnought era roughly between the Battles of Tsushima and Jutland will be the game's strong suit but the eras of ship designing representing its "end points" ie: the first Ironclads to the last Battleships will be weak points. tl:dr the game's scope is currently toooooo wide and mechanical abstractions sitting at the endpoints of its broadness risk unraveling others. Without necessary abstractions for a kind of given threat (ie: sails, airplanes, to a lesser extent coastal fortifications, mines, merchant raiders etc) much of the game's content will be reduced to short-lived gimmick at best (representing wasted time and development resources), exploitable loopholes for mechanics cheese at worst (representing total structural collapse of the game's premise). Some of us have already seen the comical "mount 500 secondaries on Yamato" joke builds that could easily lead to exploitable loopholes in the game's mechanics. This is a fairly typical problem with these games, many tabletop games make the same mistake, which is to view the growth of a technology purely as a matter of the avoidance of obsolescence and not at-all of a matter of trends and social relations.* But this is grossly inadequate for describing and characterizing the manner in which technology changes or configures to meet the demand of a given challenge or set of challenges. Had the First World War broken out in 1908, the history of the war at sea might well include the platitude that the British had been totally wrong to configure their gun design around large caliber/low velocity while the German and French navies had been right to chase guns of light caliber/high velocity because the British had failed to appreciate the value of the armor-piercing cap and its ability to overmatch a given depth of armour with a relatively small caliber of shot. (1) I'm prepared to see that these are just the growing pains of a game in a pre-alpha stage of development...but it's apparent that continuous widening of the game's scope with no concern for the consequences of that is becoming both sloppy and dangerous. I really want this game to be good, but the current forecast and trends for this game's development still basically leave it inferior to table-top based alternatives like Great War at Sea and DVG games... *The so called, much-cliched, and totally inappropriate "tech tree", a popular (and absolutely incorrect) abstraction for representing the evolution of a technology that is nonetheless a favorite of video game designers. The reality is that warship design was a mixed product of trends some of which were evolutionary, and some of which were more appropriately described as configuration or compromise rather than stacked bonus. (1) In fact, the war's breakout in 1914 was just after the widespread adoption of Director-controlled fire by the world's naval forces, and this led to the rapid, hyperbolic increase in normal battle ranges that became normal during the war. By the time the Battle of Dogger Bank happened, normal battle ranges were in the realm of 18,000-19,000 meters. The usefulness of the ballistic cap fell off rapidly at such ranges, and size of shot began to matter far more especially for plunging fire onto decks. Voices in the Admiralty and informed criticism from other Navies seemed to imply for some time that the British had made a big mistake (in fact the real mistake had been the use of lyddite over TNT as a burster for British AP rounds) but circumstance led to the vindication of their configuration. Which American and Japanese observers took important note of in their own future designs. (The Germans stuck stubbornly to the idea of close brawling after the war which was why Bismarck had a heap-o-belt armor.)