RAMJB

You can check my standard of use of time compression in the videos I've already posted. If you don't want to suffer from a severe case of hearing and psychological trauma due to my accent (which is fully understandable XD), I'll sum it up for you: I rarely time compress AT ALL - until the battle is decided (enemy fleeing due to damage, enemy reduced to a many vs 1 situation, etc). For more accurate portrayal yesterday I tried to record a video for the channel where I repeated the attempt I made a couple days ago to get a 1BB and 2 DDs vs 1BB and 2DDs going. Last time it...let's say...didn't go as planned when the AI dropped a 103.000 tons monster on my 35000 ton ship. Made for a quite funny clip but not one that I could use for any kind of insightful advice on tactics or any kind of historical similarity. For obvious reasons. So I tried to re-run the thing and hope for a better setup. I indeed was more lucky this time and the AI brought along a 45.000 ton ship to fight off my 8x15'' 35000 tonner. From ranges of 18 down to 15km and in 10 minutes flat, the enemy ship was reduced to 12% flotation, which is when he turned tails and began running. I stopped the recording at that moment. There was no way I could keep up with the commentary without pointing out that such a result was an absolutely ridiculous thing. And it was, to the point of making the whole video pointless other than to point out a severe flawed damage model. It was happening on screen, I couldn't act as if nothing "strange" was going on, or as if all things the game was showing were all fine and A-OK. I had to adress the elephant on the room, or just ditch the video. As I don't want to do that kind of coverage with a game that's in early alpha testing phase, I made no video instead. Simply stated, at this stage there's no point in showing footage only to prove that something's wrong. That's unfair to the game and the developers as things going wild during a testing phase is something that's the be expected. On the other hand that puts me in the position of...having nothing to upload. But I guess that's my own problem, though. That's because 3'' guns were woefully inadequate at the time of dealing with destroyers. I've mentioned it many times in the past, but I have no problems mentioning it again: The design motivation of the Iron Duke class was to step up the secondary battery from 4'' caliber of the previous class to 6'' caliber that became standard afterwards because already in 1908 there were serious misgivings about the ability of 4'' guns to present a credible defense against the destroyers of the time (which displaced less than 1000 tons). If 4'' guns weren't deemed enough to be enough to deal with DDs, go figure 3'' ones. So, while previously "destroyers couldn't do anything against other destroyers with their 3'' guns" that just means that previously things were working as they should. While now, they are not. I'm one who has already pointed that the game is in very early stages and that's missing many features that synergize with many other features already here. For instance, the ability to manually choose secondary targets (which you currently can't do), or the lack of "supression under fire". Things that will be here, but aren't yet. But there's no features that I think are missing that explain how ships can nuke each other so easily now, or that gives me any kind of expectative that when introduced they'll normalize the situation. Simply stated: Gun accuracy at most ranges is too high, and shell-caused flooding hits is exceedingly high aswell. The end result are 45000 tonners being shut down in 10 minutes by 15'' gunfire. That's not because of "missing game terms". That's because the damage model isn't right.

May I be so bold as to please ask you exactly how, from an engineering point of view, those ships didn't work as intended? Please keep in mind that in the list of roles to cover in their doctrine, taking capital ship caliber hits was not in the list. Simply stated, those ships weren't designed to take the hits that blew them. So you can't blame the engineering end of things on the loss of Invincible, Queen Mary and Indefatigable on "things that didn't work as intended". Those ships weren't intended to take those hits to begin with. Now doctrinally there were based on a flawed concept. And let's not talk about things like the Spurious, Outrageous and Curious. That can happen. Ill-conceived weapons from the doctrinary standpoint have existed across history, both on navies, armies and air forces. But that should be perfectly demonstrated by the game by teaching you the lesson that if you bring big ships to a big gun battle, they better have protection less they vanish under heavy gunfire. Being destroyed due to being designed on wrong tactical grounds is one thing and I expect the game to fully embrace that idea. But being destroyed because a ship's system "didn't work as intended" is a whole different one, and that's what we're talking about here. So I reiterate my question: how, and in which manner, didn't those ships work as intended from an engineering point of view?.

On the opposite. guns of 9'' and higher were trending towards being added as complement to the main guns before the introduction of the "all big gun" battleship with HMS Dreadnought cut that trend off forever. They were intended to be part of the primary battery. They were not "secondaries" - certainly not as we understand them nowdadays. You name the Lord Nelson class. 12'' AND 9.2'' primary battery. What was then called "mixed battery". Lord Nelson's secondary battery was the 24x3'' battery. Not the 9.2'' guns. Those were part of the ship's main battery ;).

On the opposite, I'm making the case that out of a handful of battleships, all the rest were built according to traditional principles and engineering practices that were both sound, and extensively tested by the time they entered service. German extreme pressure machineries were used on the twins, which a lot of people don't even qualify as battleships. The Bismarcks had standard machinery, and if anything, the design was too conservative (anchored in the WW1-style incremental armor layout). Japanese battleships' only claim for innovation was size. size of ship, size of guns, size of armor - other than that they were pretty much conventional. US battleships might have had initial trouble with radar, but they had pretty good optical systems anyway and were sound and practical in every other way. The "Long etcetera" pretty much covers non-essential systems for the ships. That the british UP AA rocket was a miserable failure didn't compromise the ship in any way at the time of taking hits, for instance. Essentially what I'm saying is that designers weren't idiots and they designed battleships with a common idea in mind: making them durable. They didn't compromise in innovation for the sake of innovation - they went with solid, tested, exhaustively tried practices when designing their ships. Sometimes to a fault (Bismarck). The italians were an exception with their TDS. But that's one nation (and three ships) out of dozens in the world. At any rate I can accept that RNG screws me over now and then and that I can get my otherwise solid and well designed BB shot out with a single hit (be it gunfire, torpedo, whatever) now and then. Key part here: "now and then" Having BBs being sunk all the time after a few minutes of taking a few heavy hits is not a case of "one hit wonders" or "RNGesus thumbing you down". It's a case of a damage model that needs some serious look into, because currently ,it's not right. See it's so bad that the video I was recording today I had to ditch. I couldn't make a credible case of why a 45.000 ton warship with perfectly good armor protection got it's whole waterline rip open to massive flooding from 15'' gunfire at a range of 15 km in less than 10 minutes flat of engagement. The warship wasn't even mine - was the AI's. I can't make a video of a game I'm hyping because it intends to portray immersive naval combat of the age of the big gun battlesyip, trying to make it look good, when ridiculous stuff like that goes on in the screen. So I ended up uploading nothing today.

Not on sound, technology already put to the test of battle, or subjected to extensive material testing. We're not talking advanced electronics here, we're talking solid engineering that had passed the most essential validation tests, be it with repeated and intensive tests or directly subjected to the test of battle. In what regards to TDS system the fundaments of the "conventional" TDS were already integral to the first generations of dreadnoughts, and once past that stage and after intensive (and I mean, really really *really* intensive) testing the more evolved layered TDS principle was born. That TDS model, under many different shapes and forms, all conforming to the same basic essential principles, proved it's worth several times during WW2. Same as many other principles based on solid, well established, foundations that had been exhaustively tested and tried. There are no exceptions to that rule. The only systems that "didn't live up to their expectations" where those thought as "innovative" (if not revolutionary) that had either a) not properly tested in practice (in live fire tests) or b) had been built defective because poor shipbuilding practices. The italian TDS was one of those cases. The Pugliese system originated in an engineering idea that looked good on paper, that wasn't properly put to the test (because of the italian poor finances during the interwar years) and which only claim to be "workable" was it's integration in two experimental ships (Brennero and Tarvisio) that never suffered from any kind of underwater damage during their careers. It was an innovation for the sake of innovation - there was nothing inherently wrong with a layered system that was already known by the time Pugliese came up with his idea. The italians went with it anyway because...italian. No matter the alternative was a sound and proven system that had been adopted by every other navy in the world, they went with an unproven design, with an insufficient testing to guarantee it's true effectiveness. And then came the second part. The Pugliese system demanded a very wide hull to provide for the (Rather extensive) depth the system needed to properly function. It was however slapped onto WW1 battleships hulls undergoing conversion, without taking in account that their hulls were nowhere near beamy enough to leave enough space for the TDS system to work as intended. Net result - it didn't work. And Cavour went down after a single torpedo hit at Taranto. To complicate matters, the Littorios suffered several torpedo hits during their careers and the reports are decidedly mixed. Some of them praise the system - when it worked. Others damn it completely because of poor construction workmanship meant metallurgic weaknesses on several junctures of the system against the internal bulkhead, causing weaknesses through which the force of torpedo detonations (intended to crush the internal "cylinder of the system") ruptured through, rendering the whole system innefective. Amongst several other things (I mean, the official Supermarina report on Littorio's damage on the night of Taranto, conducted by Admiral Bergamini made a point explaining that Littorio's damage was worse than expected because "it was known the ship was of worse construction than Vittorio Veneto." Yikes). Long story short, TL:DR; engineering in the 30s and 40s is not what it is today in the age of computerized systems and electronics. Back them systems that were properly tested and thoroughly tried and experimented with didn't just "not live up to expectations" out of the blue, as long as they were properly built. It was only when "innovative" systems that were lacking in proper thorough testing of effectiveness and reliability were involved, or when construction defects due to poor shipyard practices played a part, that problems happened. German super-high pressure machineries. Italian TDS systems. Japanese "opposite island" carriers. US early war Radar (gave endless trouble during Guadalcanal to the point of confusing an island with an enemy ship at one point). Long etcetera.

and #2 only holds true if the hit ship has woeful antitorpedo protection. Just one torpedo won't sink a ship with a proper purpose-designed Torpedo Defense System (and yes I'm excluding Cavour from that category alltogether, the italian WW1 rebuilds simply didn't have the space to make the Pugliese system work as intended, and it showed, because it didn't. So it was a purpose designed TDS indeed, but it was not a "proper" TDS)

I'm not fully ok with the "structural parameter" to judge if a ship has been sunk. Right now I can accept it as a representation of an "abandon ship" order that would make sense after a certain portion of the ship had been reduced to twisted metal. But I'm still not overly comfortable with it. I disagree that "the flooding situation which gunfire vs BBs is not that good at". On the opposite - I think it's greatly overdone and that ships take far too much flooding damage out of shell hits. Compounded with the pretty generious hit ratios the game throws, the result is a tremendously short lifespan for any battleship to which things began going south. It just doesn't look right at all considering the ammount of punishment ships were able to take and survive in naval engagements. I think the problem of your estimation is indeed skewed by your design choices ;). 18'' guns with SH ammunition will be the end-it-all-game of all end-it-all-games in campaign mode, and there's not a single instance of something like that ever used (Yamato's 18'' rounds were rather lightweight for their caliber). I'm sure that 2.5 ton shells would make a number on virtually anything they touched - but that's not the point of the overall arch the game covers. The problem that others of us are trying to point out is that when using more or less historical design practices (which will be the major part of the game's campaign when released), ships just don't last what they should - and they don't do so by a wide stretch. Again, the Bismarck comparison is a tremendously extreme instance of the kinds of punishment big warships could stand, and maybe a too extreme one to the point of being skewed - but we do have the reports of the battle damage survived by other units in other engagements, and it's equally tremendous (one only has to go through a list of the kind of punishment the german BCs or HMS Warspite went through during Jutland only to survive to get an idea). The point remains that, on more or less historical ship sizes and weapons, ships sink too fast. Particularily so battleships. And this is a problem for the game's intentions, specifically those involving any future implementation of the campaign.

Thanks. And I mean it. Too many people would try to go all "scapegoat mode" at this point. Thanks for your frankness and sincerity. Now I didn't make those questions just to get that answer out from you. They are actually important. Specifically in the timeframe that most people feel is "accurately portrayed", namely, 1940. We do have several BB surface battles in 1941-42. Denmark Straits. Bismarck's final battle. The night engagements off Guadalcanal: one encounter where BBs were present in only one side, another where BBs were present on both side. The night encounters are a bit off the analysis here accuracy wise - they were fought at night and at extremely short ranges (literally so short that at one point of the first battle of guadalcanal Hiei couldn't shoot at a chargin US destroyer because it was so close her guns couldn't depress enough to shoot at it). But they can be used for extrapolating the kind of damage necessary to sink a WW1 vintage battlecruiser. But the big instances here should be Denmark Strait and Bismarck's final battle. Bismarck opened up on Hood at 5.55am. Scored hits only on the 5th salvo, at an estimated range of 16.5km. That was considered as "excellent gunnery" and was coming from the most modern battleship in the world at the time - translates into 1 (maybe 2) hits out of 40 shells fired - or into a 2.5, or 5% hit ratio depending on how many shells actually hit. Go into the game, get yourself a 1940 battleship, put it 16.5km off an enemy battleship and see the impact calculations. The "excellent accuracy from a state of the art battleship" of a ship that's still revered for the accuracy of it's gunfire....is dwarfed to nothingness in this game. As for the damage effects go - Bismarck was engaged by two heavy cruisers and two battleships in her final battle. Those four ships spent the following ammount of ammunition: 380 of 40.6 cm from Rodney 339 of 35.6 cm from King George V 527 of 20.3 cm from Norfolk 254 of 20.3 cm from Dorsetshire 716 of 15.2 cm from Rodney 660 of 13.3 cm from King George V Now, we do not have reliable accounts of the true ammounts of hits Bismarck sustained. But taking in account that the bulk of the firing happened at distances well below 10km (and at ranges as short as 2500m), to a ship that was dead in the water for most of the engagement, we can assume they were A LOT. Bismarck stood that pounding for 74 minutes since the first registered hit until she went under the waves. Including at least two direct impacts into her citadel (reportedly scored by Rodney, lots of theories about how that happened given that Rodney's guns were not supposed to be able to go into the machinery of that ship from the range she fired at). In fact those would be hits on the "Main citadel" - barbettes and turrets were also considered "critical equipment" and part of the citadel, and Bismarck got all four blown up by direct hits, so actually there were more than just two citadel hits. Try to repeat that scenario in this game. Now, I'll be the first to admit that Bismarck is an extreme instance because of how sturdy that ship was, who much attention was paid at make it survivable (Specially at the short ranges involved in that action), and because Bismarck was for all intents and purposes a soft kill after only 20 minutes, which is what took the british force to reduce her to a mostly silenced status. But it still lasted 74 minutes before going down. Of the most brutal gunning down in naval history. Not even with the highest protective settings in the game you'll get a ship to survive 10 minutes of a pounding like that - and likely they will be MUCH less than 10 minutes. Bottom point is that battleships were VERY HARD to kill with gunnery (unless some exceptional circunstance as a magazine detonation was involved). Exceedingly hard, in fact. They are not in the game, and not by a long shot. As for my questions about the citadel hits and why is that somehow relevant to the discussion: Bismarck took, as mentioned, two hits into the machinery areas. They caused mayhem and had Bismarck been at full speed, it'd probably would've caused her to lose most of it because of machinery damage - but they didn't cause any kind of critical survability damage, or hasten the demise of the ship in any meaningful way. The citadel was not a "black box" that if hit would blow the ship up (unless those hits happened exactly on the magazines). It was an area of equipment of the outmost importance for the battleworthiness of the ship. Machinery. Engineering areas. Barbettes. Turrets. And yes, magazines. A battleship could sustain severe damage into the citadel without necessarily compromising the ability of the ship to stay afloat - as long as none of those hits would blow the magazines up, that is. Hits in the citadel would cause a drastic decrease in battleworthiness of the battleship, but were not necessarily "lethal" on their own. What sunk battleships was the same that sunk everything else: flooding either killing the flotability of the ship, or destabilizing it so much as to capsize it. And currently in the game is FAR too easy to deal that kind of terminal damage with gunfire. And accordingly, and mixed with the exceedingly generous gunnery hit estimations, ships last a fraction of what they did in real engagements. Again, thanks for your frankness in your answer :).

I'm terribly sorry to bring this up again, but barring direct penetrations to the magazine, where does this statement come from?. What source?. Based on which studies said source uses on it's own?. Which reports back it up?. What exactly is the estimated number of shells equivalent to "a whole bunch" as presented in the relevant reports and sources that would "quick a BB rather quickly"?. Two?. Three? a Dozen? two dozens?. And what's the estimate of "rather quickly" in minutes?. 5? 10? half an hour?.

Nobody is complaining because ships sink very fast after an ammo detonation.... But several of us are complaining that without those kind of critical hits at all ships sinks FAR too easily now. Pointing a fundamental problem with the damage model.

Welcome to classification hell. Let's begin with the basics: the historical differentiation between inter-war "light" and "heavy" cruisers boils down to one thing and one thing only: weapon size. Since the London Treaty the separation made between both was that one. No other. You could have a 10000 ton warship armed with 6'' guns (no matter how many of them) it'd be a "light" cruiser. You could have the exact same hull armed with 8'' guns (no matter how many of them) and you'd get a "heavy cruiser". As a result you get a zillion of instances of ships labelled as "light cruisers" which were "light" in nothing but the name. The ridiculousness of the situation is best described by Mogami, a class of ships that when given 15 6'' guns was classed as a "light Cruiser", but when rearmed with 10 8'' guns became "heavy" overnight...on the exact same hull dimensions and nominal displacement. Many people have lost their mind over this. I remember in the RTW forums people making a whole mess about how the designer's limits for the CL class prevented them from designing a Cleveland or a Brooklyn - when in fact all they had to do to design those ships was to label them in the designer as what they were historically in practice: CAs with 6'' guns. But they didn't want to "because then they would be CAs and not CLs". Ignoring, of course that those ships, were, in fact, heavy cruisers just named "light" for treaty convenience first, out of pure custom later on once the treaties expired. Sigh. That thread still is in my nighmares about how unreasonable and shortsighted some people truly are. Anyway. I see a similar situation here but from the other end. You see the designer hulls for the Light cruisers and their bonuses, and of course and undestandably you don't understand why a Cleveland should have those bonuses. Rest assured, ships like that shouldn't have them - and rest assured, ships like that won't. The Cleveland hull will be in the Heavy Cruiser tab - where it belongs (it was the same hull of the Baltimore class, for crying out loud). Same as the Towns, Mogamis, Brooklyns, etc. The in-game "Light cruisers" are intended to represent truly light cruisers. Meaning - oversized destroyer flotilla leaders (a Japanese Nagara, for instance), and very fast scouts (the italian first iterations of the condottieris, or the german SpähKreuzer project). The hulls present there will cover that part of the spectrum: TRUE Light cruisers, those which were light cruisers not only in name, but also in characteristics. For those the bonuses make sense. The big, 12x6'' (or more) family of Cruisers "light on name, but not on practice" you'll be building as heavy cruisers. Which is what they were in practice.

Those were direct penetrations into the magazines that blew them up (or barbette penetrations that caused flash fires which pretty much ended in the same way). So, on historical terms, barring a direct critical magazine hit with subsequent magazine detonations (main ammo explosion), the results described avobe are completely out of whack.

You: also you: That's making stuff up, implying that japanese officers (and soldiers) would never run away from a battle in the late part of the war (When there are plenty of instances of them doing just that even in the early part of it). Now, look: I really am done with this stuff. I don't care about having the last word on anything. But what I'm not going to let anyone do is to suggest I'm lying "or making things up", when I'm not. If you go that path, you'll be forcing my hand in making me answering when for all intents and purposes I'm done here. Now I'd suggest you to leave it at that as I really intend to do too, because this is turning into something awfully like a personal fight. One I'm not looking for, one I'm not trying to get into, nor one I intend to be a part of in a civilized public forum. You proposed a feature. I disagreed with that proposal giving arguments of why. You still think your proposal has merit, and I still disagree. All good, fine and dandy. We're both done here, let's agree to disagree, leave it as what it is. No need to keep this up :).

Yet you keep doing it all the time. Whatever, the horse is dead, already beaten and turned into a pulp. I'm not insisting in stuff I already stated.

Yet that is exactly what happened. And several times over. Yamamoto didn't push his massive surface fleet to the gates of Midway at a point where the US carrier force was mostly spent (Yorktown KO, Enterprise and Hornet's attack squadrons depleted) and the american surface forces only had cruisers at best to oppose Yamato and the cream and crop of the japanese battleline. He called off the operation and turned back home . Kurita didn't push through Taffy 3 and the escorting forces either. He turned tails and ran, which ended the Battle of Samar when he held all the cards to cause devastation on the american invasion forces. Mikawa didn't push towards Lunga after he had destroyed several cruisers. He withdrew his forces leaving the american invasion force alone. Do I have to go on?. But japanese officers never ran away from battle. Of course they didn't. Not once. That's a widely known "established" "Fact". That is "widely known" nobody will deny. That is a "Fact"...now that's a different thing. Because no, it's not a fact. It's pure legend, like so many others that don't resist even the simplest attempt at validation. The japanese were far more reluctant to withdraw that any other nation, this is true. They also were involved in many suicidal operations, that much is also true. But that doesn't mean "they never ran away from battle". Because that's just both ludicrous, and completely false. But of course, "you do not see it happening". Like many other things. I mean, I really don't want to sound rude here, but if you want to push for a given feature, just stop arguing for it based on made up historical grounds that aren't real. It might be a problem with me being an OC a$$hole but when I see how much people quote "historical facts" that are neither historical, nor facts,I just can't help but wonder why so many people insist on trying to make points out of history, when they don't know enough of that history themselves. At any rate, my opinion on the matter has been stated, no need to beat a dead horse. You want that feature to be included, be my guest and keep on asking for it, but please do it on the basis of your own personal wishes for the gamemode to be a stomping ground where you can roflstomp inferior forces at will - that's perfectly acceptable. I will disagree with it, but it's a valid reason to ask for that feature. Just please do not do it on the basis of making wrong historical references that, simply stated, are out of context and not true..

R and T to rotate items that you're placing. Doesn't work very well with mirrored placements (the mirror-placed items aren't rotated) but you can rotate them individually afterwards. It does make a gameplay difference. Default positioning can define how fast a gun is able to bear towards the target at the beginning of the battle. It's pretty minor but it's something. Also rotating the items might allow you to put them in slightly different places than with the standard positioning. Which can be pretty useful for giving better cross-deck angles for wing turrets that are intended for that purpose. This is something I've been thinking about making a video of. Making wing turrets work well, and specially without messing up your ship's balance isn't very easy, but if you know how to do it it can be done without too much trouble.

No 100k monster for this one :P. But man, those DDs were annoying:

No, not really. The difference between a 11'' shell and a 12'' shell was already more than telling. Not to talk about the difference between two caliber sizes. We're talking that a 11'' gun fired a 300kg shell (on average) while a 12'' one would fire a 400kg one (again, on average). That's an increase in 25% of projectile mass. The effects will be more than notable and easy to identify. There's no way you're going to confuse a 12'' hit with a 11'' one, let alone a 10'' one.

Because I've already tested the new things, and I agree with Akd. And I'm not "Protesting". I'm backing someone else's post. Where's the problem in that?.

They also could develop the game they intend and promised, according to the parameters that match those intentions, and just forego hearing the "opinions" of those who know as much about naval warfare as I do about the abyssal ecosystems in the depths of the Mariana Trench. Because "coalescing" opinions is something tremendously dangerous when a lot of those "opinions" come from people who can't tell the difference between bow and stern.

Based on what?. Yes, a battleship is a bigger ship. But a destroyer is a FAR more lively firing platform that's pitching, rolling and swelling with the movement of the sea like mad, and which (until very late with the most advanced techs) was fired by hand and didn't have much in the way of stabilization...if any at all. Meanwhile the battleship is not only far stabler, and battleship secondaries were given stabilizing gear before it was widespread on destroyers with the advance of technology. So what's easier, to shoot a smaller enemy from a relatively stable platform? or shooting a bigger one from one that's moving like mad in all directions you can't predict?. Also, speed doesn't really matter at close enough ranges when the firing method changes from plot-and-spot to direct line of sight aim-and-shoot. If the enemy is faster you only need to lead more. When that close it does not matter wether you're moving at 30 knots or 20 knots, all the enemy has to do is lead a little bit more or less. The game does NOT represent that: Hit chances at point blank are seriously compromised by the way penalties and bonuses work, and in a big way too. TL:DR: akd is right.

Steering, and propulsion in general, were the achilles heel of big warships of the era. For very much the reasons you stated: given their position they were impossible to protect properly.

I don't know if this qualifies as "beautiful". For those who like to see flies squashed by hammers at least it's going to be paradise... For me it was a laugh, at the very least.

I wasn't kidding... XDDDD

In a few minutes I'll be linking here a video to my last custom battle. Wanted to do a 1BB&2DDs vs 1BB&2DDs scenario. 1935, 20km start. To make things interesting I restricted myself to WT limits. meaning, 35k tons max, no guns beyond 15''. So I designed such a ship and went into battle. I won't spoil what the AI brought to that battle. You'll have to see to believe XD. All I know is that I don't remember the last time time I laughed that much while getting my ass so absolutely crushingly and completely whooped by a game XD.