SpardaSon21

Yep. The Pensacola-class of cruisers were originally designed, built, and designated as light cruisers despite their 8" main armament but because of their thin armor, which is why unlike most US cruisers they also mounted a set of triple torpedo tubes on each side. It wasn't until 1931, two years after their commissioning and eight years after the treaty took effect that they were redesignated as heavy cruisers. The two ships were also laid down in 1926, so it wasn't like the USN was unaware of the treaty stipulations while they were building them.

The Highflyers were second-class cruisers. Even a third-class cruiser like the Pearl is extremely difficult to build.

A major issue is CL hulls do not have the gun mounts or even displacements for anything historical. The Dresdens had 10 4" guns and another 8 2" guns... and you can barely fit that. The Brit Highflyers that entered service in 1899 had this: 11 6-inch guns and 8 3-inch guns, and entering service in 1898. Can you even lay down a 5750 ton CL in 1897? Hell, here's one laid down even before the game starts: That's a 9500 ton "CL" laid down in 1888, and with a 9.2" main armament and 6" casemates. Things would be far, far less stupid if towers didn't weigh an absurd amount. I had no idea the Dunkerque's main tower weighed three thousand tons, or more than an entire destroyer, even before you start adding components on. Thank you for correcting me, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts. /s

To go with what SodaDave just said, you can't even historically armor smaller calibers any more. A 6" gun tops out at 4.5" of barbette armor, when the US Cleveland-class cruisers had 6" of barbette protection. It is also impossible to put vertical protection on 4" guns for whatever reason, but 4.1"/105mm guns can have protection, even if they top out at 1.6", below the 50mm/2" thickness the German CL's had for their gun shields. All guns, even 2" and smaller, should be able to carry at least .5"/13mm of vertical protection that would be equivalent to a splinter shield, especially since even the 2" Mark 1 guns are modeled with such a gun shield. EDIT: You still can't put armor on a 5" gun's barbette despite me reporting that as a bug several times. Either fix the tooltip to refer to 5.2" or larger or allow barbette armor on 5.1" and 5" guns.

How are why are the campaign values and UI values different? Shouldn't they both be drawing from the exact same source, the ship's own designed stats?

An old post from 2019 mentioned that the basic Iron Plate armor in the game (yes, the starter 1890 armor), has performance on-par with IRL USA Class B armor from WW2. Yes, that homogenous Class B armor, arguably the finest homogenous armor in the world. And we only improve quality from there, dramatically. The issue isn't that light cruisers can mount 6" of armor, but that 6" of armor can stop all but the largest shells.

Agreed. From my understanding the three major weights of a ship are firepower, protection, and speed. Superstructures appear to have been built around those three elements using leftover tonnage, not a major component for players to worry about like they are in UAD.

One of the big issues I've noticed regarding stability is how heavy towers are. I'm trying to build a pocket battleship for the "The Pocket Battleship" academy mission and my main tower is 15% of the total weight of the ship, second only to the hull. Removing the RDF and the rangefinders and using Triangular Tower IV, the lowest, drops it down to 2,500 tons and 12%... still well above the bulkheads at 11.7 or the torpedo bulges at 8.4%. Using Geared Turbines 2 and a speed of 28 knots on Advanced Heavy Cruiser 2, somehow the machinery that takes up my entire centerline, boilers and transmissions, is a mere 670 tons. Did I mention I'm using a maxed out beam? How the hell does any of that add up? I somehow have 2,500 tons of steel on top of my hull. Can someone more familiar with ships tell me how much those upper assemblies are supposed to weigh? I'm pretty sure it shouldn't be more than my internal bulkheads (set at Many) I also have a third of the 2,570 tons of fuel oil an actual Deutschland-class carried. What's really ridiculous is that the Modern Secondary Tower IV is bigger than that Triangular Tower IV... and is less than half the weight at only 1,100 tons.

There's a reason there's a suggestion out there for the game to show you calculated armor levels for the ships instead of needing you to constantly do the math on your own.

No, because all your pics are of shielded open mounts. Just because they had 2" thick gun shields to protect the crews that doesn't make them turrets.

I'm talking specifically about the mount types you mentioned, not others. Oh yes, that's quite the turret there on Bremen. If you have information that any of the later ships mounted those guns in turrets as opposed to hand-operated mount like that I would love to see it, because I have not been able to find any online. Frankfurt of the Wiesbaden-class wasn't much different in terms of mounting, even with a larger 15cm gun, nor even the second Koenigsburg-class or even the WW1 Coeln-class. The Royal Navy wasn't any better, not having proper turrets on their CL's until the post-WW1 Enterprise. And unfortunately when you hit 25 knots such as with some scout cruisers in the 1905 era you're looking at massive smoke interference to do so. Also @Nick ThomadisYou still can't armor 5"/12.7cm gun barbettes, needing to upscale it to 5.2"/13cm before the game allows you to do so. Either change the tooltip that says 5" gun barbettes can mount armor, or let 5" gun barbettes mount armor. And yes, I just sent a bug report.

Those were open mounts on the light cruisers, not turrets, with only a couple inches of steel for splinter protection. The game also can't properly do those CL's because those side casemates are restricted to 3" guns as part of the "No Main Guns in Casemates" restriction they need to address, not just for the USA, but because the German CL's mounted some of their main 10.5cm guns in those side casemates. They seriously need to re do guns and turrets soon. Yes, but the devs are going to need to adjust funnels to make that possible in the early years. Its ridiculous how inefficient engines are early on, especially for CL's which desperately need that stat given their role.

In @neph's pics? Yeah, both guns are brown powder/black powder.

How the hell does a gun with a 451" long barrel have worse range and muzzle velocity than a gun with a 424.2" long barrel, especially with the other gun using heavier shells?

Not even that. The USA was using a fully-powered vertical sliding breech on the 5"/38. Its just that the massive weight involved for that level of automatic loading (up to 77 metric tons including hoist systems for a DP mount) made it tough to scale up to larger calibers and shells. One of the Des Moines class turrets weighed 458 metric tons as a result of all that heavy duty machinery, versus around 300 for one of the Baltimore triple turrets. 212 metric ones for one of the dual turrets on Worcester versus 176 metric tons for one of the triples on Cleveland. That said, 12 rounds a minute at any angle versus 10 at only up tp 20 degrees is a big improvement, and arguably worth the weight and cost.

Would be nice, but so long as accuracy is so heavily tied to range we won't get that. The fact the developers insist on maximum range contributing to accuracy at all range brackets, even point-blank, is going to seriously hurt this game long-term. Game Labs has the major issue of basing things around the way they think they are or think they should be just as bad if not worse than a major AAA developer, and the way they calculate and scale gun accuracy is a major issue they have been repeatedly told is not viable, and yet they refuse to address any of our concerns. Range would be the point, but they absolutely need to reduce or eliminate the reload penalty in that case in favor of serious weight increase. The 5"/38 guns I love talking about were by themselves quite light... but their overall mounts were extremely heavy to accommodate the all-elevation semi-auto loading system and electro-hydro traverse that gave the SP twin mounts a ridiculous 14.7 degrees a second of traverse rate. Realistically speaking though, big guns didn't vary a whole lot in barrel length, the biggest changes being 12" guns going from L/25 or L/30 to L/50 right before they were replaced. Big guns were generally built as long as technology allowed for obvious reasons, but smaller guns had a lot more variation between nations, especially in similar time periods. Even so, you run into diminishing returns once you hit L/50 or so as the powder can't sustainably burn for the whole length, not without adding enough powder to risk dangerously unsafe chamber pressures. There's a reason nobody made serious attempts at super-long tank guns after WW2 ended, and the issues there are only magnified as you go up in shell size.

Speaking of pitch and stability with big guns mounted forwards: Man, I can't think of anyone who would consider putting a 3" or larger gun up on a forecastle. Nobody at all... Literally nobody.

Agreed. There's a reason the 5"/38 is widely considered to be the best overall secondary of WW2, and it isn't just because it was DP. The inter-war destroyer leaders the US built used it in SP twin mounts, and I don't think anyone has accused the Porter-class or Somers-class of being poorly armed. Despite only being 38 calibers in length the US gun lost less than two kilometers in max range compared to the Japanese 12.7cm/50 used on Fubuki and later ships. In 1944 the British put forth plans to strip out the mixed secondary battery of the Nelsons with six twin 5"/38 guns, which would be monumentally stupid in this game, since who would choose to swap out 6x2 6"/50 guns and six 4.7"/40 guns with only 6x2 5"/38 guns? They really need to redo citadel weights for TBs and destroyers, mostly because those ships never had dedicated citadels like larger ships did, possessing splinter protection at best, as far as I am aware

Cannot add barbette armor to guns that are less than 5.2" in caliber, even when the tooltip states can be added to guns 5" and larger.

CBII shells also have a greatly increased ricochet chance because... reasons, so you're also less likely to pen or partial pen in any circumstance besides firing directly at their citadel.

If you don't have one of those ridiculously OP super-BB hulls that can get up to 98% damage reduction for gunfire, assuming of course you can actually pen them thanks to their ricochet chances, yes, torpedoes are horrifying since there's more fish in the water from AI fleets than if you were to visit an aquarium.

This is the single biggest issue with them. Torps have zero of the downsides guns do: weather, aim times, accuracy, etc. IRL aiming torpedoes was just as difficult as aiming guns, complete with the need to compute targeting solutions. A good way to represent that, IMO, would be to add a similar system to gun aiming for torpedoes, with 0-100% being the accuracy of your firing solution. 0 means the torpedoes fire off randomly as you don't know where to aim, and 100% means they're aimed precisely center mass of where the target is expected to be. Turns and speed changes by both sides would reduce the solution strength, and then recover as ships return to stable courses. And obviously wind, weather, and sea state would all reduce the ability to get an accurate track, perhaps even to the point of making it impossible to get a guaranteed course set for the torpedoes. And then of course, we can get actual torpedo accuracy modeled (as hinted at by some torpedo techs and modules), so early torps will have a tendency to run off-course, even with that 100% computed firing angle. It should also go without saying that torpedo range needs to be actual torpedo range. No more torpedoes running indefinitely through the water. They reach their listed range, and they stop dead.

Let me know when substantial superstructure damage actually has a significant effect on your ship's performance like it did IRL, and then we'll talk about what HE should and should not be able to do.

Citadel/conning tower. And here you go for definitions. Its complicated, but yes, quite pennable. Especially since Hiei at 10" of conning tower armor used homogenous, not face-hardened armor. Which is only 95% overall effectiveness compared to US Class B homogenous armor.

That's because A. Japanese Vickers armor was terrible, and B. they're rated for that penetration at range. Hiei also had only 8 inches of centerline armor, not 10. No, really, their armor was absolutely terrible. That overall rating of 0.839 is on par with WW1 armors. Trying to use Japanese armor as a basis for pen, especially for small rounds, is laughable considering even the over-hardened American armor performs better than it when hit by anything smaller than a 18" shell.