HMS Implosive

One thing I would love to have is an option to check gun firing arcs in degrees or some fixed interval tick marks, rather than just visualy guestimate them. The current way results in all the time some awkward view adjustements while I try to figure out if my turrets have decent and/or equal arcs of fire.

This is actually a viable 4th option (in addition to 3 I listed earlier) as I would expect it to be relatively easy for devs to implement. Ship width is already something that the game calculates, after all. This would work even better if hull form and the "max optimal speed" were fuctions of the ships legth to width ratio and not only a fixed number. So you could make the ship wider to fit bigger machinery and longer to retain good hull form. The devs could even remove the width slider and decouple hull lenght from the displacement slider, and then introduce legth-to-beam -slider instead. The new displacement slider would make the ship bigger or smaller in every direction while the new legth-to-beam -slider, (or just length -slider), would add or remove hull sections when needed.

I think a good way to address issue of impossible fast ships would be to limit maximum amout of shaft horse power (SHP) a ship can produce or transfer to water. Ways to implement this, from simpliest to most complicated could be: 1. set hard cap for max SHP that depends on technology levels 2. Set hard cap for max SHP per shaft that depends on tech level. This would require new mechanics and propably rework of some of the hulls to have more realistic number of shafts. IRL, with modern technology, max SHP per shaft is some 70 000 in most applications. (bonus: give the player an option to choose the number of shafts) 3. Set a minimum volume for machinery space to produce SHP required. This would make it so that you can't just fill the ship with turrets and magazines, and still make them lightning fast, as there would be no room for machinery. If any ar all of these would be implemented, massively high speed would become more difficolt to accieve. Main way to get there would be reducing beam and/or displacement to reduce SHP required.

First off, big thanks for reworking shell characteristics! 👍@o Barão Unless I read something incorrectly, you have removed range modifiers from different weight shells. Do all the shells have same range now or is there some hidden parameters for that? (not complaining, as range vs weight wasn't that stright forward IRL anyway, just askin') Also, would you maybe revise wording of the tooltip explaining different weight shells' bouncing characteristic? I am now not entirely sure, are light shells more likely or less likely to ricochet, or does it depend on the situation. Finally, could somebody kindly enlighten me what the min and max angles actually represent in shell ballistics? That is something the game lacks a tooltip and leaves me quessing.

Just sayin', as someone who cares more about realistic looks than ingame optimization, I have so much wanted this.

@Nick Thomadis While you are right that the accuracies are estimated for the player in the penetration table, it is still either wrong or missleading (I don't know which one). I almost always use heavy or super heavy shells because they have always better nominal accuracy on these tables, even though the shell descriptions suggest othervise. (disclaimer: I have no idea how the chance to hit is eventually calculated in game. I just wanted to note that @o Barãois right in the that the heavier shells are atleast indicated to be more accurate than the lighter shells even though the tooltip advices othervise.)

I would personally be interested to build something like the interwar cruiser design with box armor sheme, ie. little to no actual belt armor but armored citadel box inside the ship instead. This sacrifices overall survivability to save weight while still protecting the ship from a single hit totally disabling it. Currently this is not possible in game as one must have thick belt armor to have thick internal belt armor. Also, would you consider giving upper regions of the hull its own armor values? In real ships it was very rare for the main deck to be the main armored deck, as this would have been very bad for weight and stability. More common was to have the main armored deck somewhere inside the ship, whilest the uppermost deck was only splinter proof if even that. If the upper hull had its own armor region (or multiple regions) the ships armor weights could be made more realistic and it would be no longer that easy to turn a ship into a solid steel ingot. Easiest way to implement this might be to have six belt regions instead of three (lower main belt, upper main belt, lower aft belt, upper aft belt, lower front belt and upper front belt, limited so that upper belts can't be thicker than the lower belts). The first citadel deck would be allowed to be as thick as one likes independent of the main deck, while the current main deck could still be made thick if one wishes, but with a cost of weight and huge destabilizing effect. If that is too much of a work, at least remove the weight reduction of the advanced armor types for a given thickness, that is just weird and too easy to exploit.

It kinda dependts. Early turbines were horribly inefficient and the range thus suffed compared to triple expanison engines. For comparison, Lord Nelson -class pre-dreadnought battleships hade range of some 9000 nm at 10 knt with triple expansion engines, while HMS dreadnought could make only 6600 nm at the same speed and turbine engines, even though the two classes dedicated roughly same percetage of the total displacement for the fuel. On the other hand, tripple expansion engine can run only so long at full power before something brakes, while turbine powered ship can retain almost full power as long as you have coal left and your stokers don't work themselves to death. However, when reduction gear, double reduction gear and turbo-electric transmisson became available, turbines efficiency rose to such a degree that using tripple expansion engine was pointless in large warships. They were still used in small and/or slow vessels like merchant ships and ASW corvettes upto ww2, as there were significant bottlenecks in production of turbine blades and they reguired less specialized knowledge from their crews to operate. If you are interested, Drachinifel has excelled video on the subject:

I am not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but when one does mount a turret on a Richelieu-style hull near the main turret barbette, the firing arcs of that turret become extremely limited on the front sector, even though there is should be nothing nothing visibly blocking them. Something similar happens on Iowa- and North carolina -style superstructures, where the upper tier secondary battery mountings have limited arcs of fire seamingly for no reason.

That's why, when I come up with an idea I think is not too difficolt to implement, I have chosen to either try and mod it myself, or more resently, suggest it to @o Barão and his wonderfull NAR overhaul, as he has been kind enough to actually fix many issues in the game people have suggested or at least answer us and let us know if he won't do something we requested. It would be much appreciated if devs could similarly, at least, keep updated some kind of to-be-done or work-in-progress listing of things. Whiles a lot of the feedback we have given here are clearly being reseaved by the devs (thank you!), it would be nice to know if something we have asked them to do is being worked on or not. P.S. Maybe devs could check out NAR and import some of the features there such as the improvements on armor and component weights, barrel lengths and hull dimensions parameters.

If one thing about events that encourage you to build more ships of a certain type should be reworked,is its consequenses (or lack of them). If a politician gives admiralty money to build cruisers, those admirals are better to actually build them. Currently in game you can agree to build the ships but can actually spend the money to what ever you wish. Suggestion: Make construction of these ships, after agreeing to do so, mandatory similar to ship deals with foreign navies. You can always refuse the deal with the politicians if you really don't need those ships.

Does this mean that to make a properly fuctioning major nation one must "borrow" home territories from some pre-existing nation?

This would be nice also for other purposes, like making the actual home provinces fit the corresponding nation better. For example, Northern Alaska is home province but Souther Alaska is not. Isn't that a bit odd?😁

When I tried to promote colonial provinces to home provinces, the game just turned them back to colonies (or what ever they should be called). Frustrating, but it seems like the province status is hardcoded somewhere. Hope you or someone else finds a way around it or devs release this for modding.

That can be done, just by changing parameters that tell that a given part is a front tower to rear tower. This can be done other parts as well: In my own game I tried and managed to make a funnel out of an American lattice mast, for example. However, doing that would just replace one weird looking rear tower with another weird lookin rear tower.