alanschu

There's internal testing that goes on because there's limited value in rolling out to outside beta testers if the build itself is very unstable.

I'm not sure the size of the team, but just looking at Steam there was a gap from April to July with limited updates. Then a surge of updates in July and August. I suspect part of it is simply that things take time and it's a small team which just makes that a lot more apparent. It doesn't seem like an unusual gap and it hasn't even been a month since the last major update.

I did seem to get a bit of activity out of Cyprus/Limassol when I went to engage them (this is a very big and slow battle) but yeah they do love that particular base and it seems I can never claim it as a war reparation either haha.

I do just want to make sure I'm understanding the system, as it *feels* like something is off, though concede feels are often wrong. I have this ship that is an otherwise empty hull but with a lot of armor to just up the weight. 50,736 tons, and it looks like the center of mass on the ship is indeed a bit to the stern of the ship when I played around with putting a single 2" gun on the hull. That makes sense. But adding a single 2" gun to the front of the ship, which adds about 4t of weight to the ship, ends up creating a 4.2% weight offset. I've seen this with other dreadnought hulls as well. I understand that leverage/force will increase the further we get from our center of mass pivot point, but it feels odd that such a small weight increase can create such an imbalance. Enough so that adding an 1800t turret to the rear still has a small offset to the fore: Now if I put that rear turret on a barbette (only a twin turret, so it actually has less weight on that point of the ship) I *do* get an aft offset, which indicates that height plays a role in the weight offsets. My physics is a bit rusty, but I'm not sure that this would make sense, especially given the huge difference in actual weights. Should height actually play a role in the weight offsets because I'm not sure why it would. I could understand some of the pitching and rolling being impacted by height, but I'm not sure why the weight balance would be overly impacted simply by the height. Just thinking of "if I had the same weight in a giant, thin, vertical tube, I wouldn't expect the hull's ability to balance that weight to be any different, but this physics model would indicate that it does." (It's been about 15ish years or so since I took my physics courses so I will concede I could be missing something!)

I did some experimenting with the Dreadnought III hull to see if I could figure some stuff out. I roughly got your ship though it's twin 14" guns, but I can replicate the extreme weight shift. First off, the "centerline" for the hull seems to be roughly where this red line is, based on not getting any weight shift if I add a casemate right there. So off the cuff with the engine being parity, the funnel a bit forward, a very heavy front tower structure and the forward turrets being further, I have a bit of a front shift which is maybe high, but doesn't strike me (a pleb who knows little) as overly offensive. The drama happens when I add casemates/secondaries. Adding one 5" casemate to the front most mount has added about 70 tons to the ship, but has significantly altered the weight offset much more than I would expect. It's like adding the casemate has caused the ship trim to be heavily shifted! I suspect that there is something wonky happening with how weight gets distributed in some cases. Not sure if it's for all hull types or just this one, but something to keep in mine when building (preliminary tests on other dreadnoughts does make it seem like small weaponry still significantly impacts the weight offsets, especially the smaller ones) Unsurprisingly with most of the casemates forward facing, it gets heavily emphasized if I fill out the casemates. 5" Casemates wholly unbalancing the ship and give me 60% fore weight offset! Adding a single 2 ton 2" gun at the front part of the ship can shift the weight offset by 5% even on an empty hull. Adding a 250 ton 8" triple turret in the same spot puts my offset to 16.6%. 2 tons is .01% of the weight so I think the effects are a bit exaggerated for secondary guns at this point.

I notice when you go to war your fleet budget (as a percentage of GDP) doubles, so there is a big influx of budget when you go to war.