RAMJB

To do a proper job at giving that information away with all the in and outs, details about introduction dates, different marks of equipment and how they evolved, in and outs of data-gathering devices, you'd have to write a book. And you'd still probably have to leave out quite a lot of stuff because as many other things, FCSs weren't the same across different navies, even if their purpose was the same. What can be done is to do an extreme effort of simplifying things to the extreme to give a rough idea about the topic, leaving out every bit of detailed explanations aside just to give a general impresion. And I'm not sure that will help or confuse people even more, as simplifications are great for getting people unfamiliar with a topic to get a general idea about it, but then with something as complex as these, generalizations end up causing confusion when taking a look at detailed things (particular classes of ships, certain engagements and how they turned out because of those details that went unexplained, etc). I guess there's no perfect solution to this other than telling anybody interested in the subject to go for a book hunt of books, many of which are out of print and/or not exactly cheap to begin with. At any rate I'll give it a try here. Again with the disclaimer of: This is an EXTREMELY simplistic explanation, which really does little more than approaching the subject to someone who's completely unfamiliar with it. Artillery is a very complex matter on itself. Aiming a gun seems very straightforward when it comes down to shooting a rifle or a handgun. Point at the target - press the trigger. But even handgun and rifle shooters know very well that the elevation and windage dials for their sights aren't there for show. Even in the simplest form of artillery possible (direct fire at ranges where gravity doesn't affect that much, against standing non moving targets), things aren't as simple as they may seem at first sight. The problem with artillery (land based one) in simplified terms can be summed up as: knowing exactly where you are, knowing where the enemy exactly is, and knowing your gun and shell properties, aswell as the atmospheric conditions that affect both, to put said shell in the enemy position. Fail any of those, your shell won't even land in the same postcode as the enemy you're intending to shoot. Naval based artillery is FAR more complex than that. Not only because the enemy is not an area you have to bombard, but a particular target you have to hit (with artillery you're not aiming at soldiers, but at the area they are emplaced, put enough shells in that area and let statistic probability do its job), but because said target is moving. While you're also moving yourself. On a very unstable medium that makes your gun pitch, roll and even yaw at times, sometimes several of those at the same times. To say it's hauntingly hard is a huge undestatement...yet that's the gist of naval artillery: fire from your own rolling and pitching unstable gun platform at a moving enemy while you're moving yourself too. Try to do that beyond pretty much next to your ship, only using your ability to "guesstimate", and it doesn't require the enemy to be any far until that stops being a skill and becomes a prayer. Yet that was the state of things in the era of the ironclad until the earliest directors came to be. Guns were mostly aimed by sheer hope and willpower by their crews, and the act of firing at anything that wasn't next to your ship (literally) was more an act of faith than letting science and phisics do their job. Ranges beyond a couple km were thought as extreme range where only a lunatic (or an incompetent) would order his ship to open fire, for it was in general a complete waste of ammunition and effort. Fighting on moved seas until proper interruptor gear was in place didn't make things easier. First efforts went towards centralized the act of firing. Initially once the order to fire was issued, each gun crew (or turret crew, or barbette crew, depending on the case it might be) was pretty much free to fire their gun as they saw fit, on their own volition, based on their own estimation of the proper aim that needed to be taken. The first step towards a proper working FCS was to take that job from the gun crews and translate it into trained officers and sailors specifically trained and instructed on the job of aiming guns - who ,from a vantage point of the ship where visibility was very good, would look at the enemy and fire guns in proper salvos (instead of local control where every gun fired whenever they thought they should). Central control by force demanded advances in some kind of gear that enabled the ship to reliably fire when in the proper position no matter how much it was rolling or pitching. Interruptor gear (through several attempted means, but usually operated through gyros) was introduced so the guns would only fire when in the "Correct" position, thus eliminating (to a degree, there was always an unavoidable margin of error in the machinery) the problem of firing your guns when the ship was out of the proper position due to it's rolling or pitching motion. It also demanded the officer at the central fire control station to have equipment that would given him the ability to fire the guns remotely from his station. Not to mention equipment to properly see the enemy, the farthest the better, while having some kind of tools to give him some kind of estimation of the enemy's own speed, distance and course. In other words, rangefinders were introduced too. With those advances suddenly there was a notable jump in gunnery effective range. Now that trained crew was specifically tasked with the mission of gunlaying, and given equipment to better judge the enemy ship's course, range and speed from much farther than before, aiming at longer ranges was possible. But still the actual act of getting the aim right was mostly a matter of guesstimation - aided by things as gunnery tables, plotting boards, slide rules, and the lot - but in the end it still was mostly firing "by eye", which means, by force, naturally innacurate and imprecise. The next step was, without question, giving those officers and crew some kind of tool to do the proper calculations faster and with precision. What they needed was a computer, one programmed to take the variables that mattered in gunnery and put out a solution. A gun solution. And that's exactly what came next and kickstarted the "director" era. Seems simple. It just so happens that we're talking the turn of the XX century here. Computers kinda were not a thing in the day. Yet that is exactly what came next. Computers. They came in several shapes, with different roles (covering different needs of gunnery) and were called many different things (in the UK alone in the immediate pre-WW1 era there were the Argo clock, the Dreyer table and the Dumaresq...now begin counting the devices other fleets used and yes...many names and many such devices). In general they're all globally classified and called "rangekeepers". To say what a rangekeeper in single terms...it'd help if anyone has ever played Silent Hunter IV and has used the TDC in that game. Because that was a true rangekeeper. To make things simple, it was a machine, an analog (mechanical) computer than when fed with a lot of data would tell you: a) where the enemy is, relative to you, on a real-time basis b) where the enemy will be, after a given ammount of time, if he was to keep course and speed c) where to aim your guns (or torpedoes, because there were rangekeepers for torpedo aiming, as US Fleet Subs used during WWII) in order to get hits Once properly refined and evolved (as everything first versions were pretty simple, the more advanced marks and versions that came the more capabilities they had) and as effective ranges became bigger and bigger they also: e) Give out solution corrections based on entered data about the estimation of fall of shot position vs enemy position. f) compensate for atmospheric conditions in their calculations (air temperature, ambient pressure, wind conditions, etc) g) account for the Coriolis effect (earth's rotation) in the calculations for long range firing. ....and more. Lots more in fact (automatic corrections for sight parallax induced errors, barrel wear, latitude, precise type of shell fired, etc) but again, let's try to keep it simple. Gunlaying with a director was completely different from gunlaying without one. Because of the longer range involved because of the the much more reliable solutions available to fire on, mixed with gun dispersion, you wouldn't fire at an individual enemy in the hopes of hitting it. And hitting individual selected parts of the enemy at any ranges beyond point blank was just out of the question. Instead what you'd do would be to find the range, course, speed of the enemy (through rangefinders), feed it (alongside many other variables including own ship speed and course, and as many as the rangekeeper was designed to account for), and tentativelly "test fire". The aim wasn't to hit the ship. The aim was to emplace your shells within a rectangle (bigger or smaller, doctrines varied in how tight salvoes should be) that would encompass the enemy ship within it. Pure statistics and probability chances would mean that some of those shells would fall on the enemy ship, if the solution was right. As for how to find out the solution rangekeepers gave half the answer. But only half, because even with computers (primitive and mechanical, but computers), the variable inputs feeded on them were still estimations, at best, in the end. So you still needed to validate your solution, and in case that it was incorrect (which most of the time, would initially be), refine it. Doctrines of the time varied at this point. Some navies just fired a salvo and watched the result, correcting accordingly for the next one. Others (notably the germans) fired what they called them "ladder" patterns where several (usually three) half-salvoes were fired on slightly different solutions to find out the most precise one, to then repeat the process to further refine it. Others did the ladder with individual turrets rather than with half salvoes...as I said, practices varied a lot between fleets and doctrines, but the goal was the same. At any rate once the solution was judged accurate (usually when you "straddled" the enemy ,meaning some of your shots fell short, some long, meaning your solution was right on spot), then the order to fire to effect was given, where the goal would be to fire your guns as fast as you could on the solution you judged was right, and let statistics do the rest. Now that had several caveats to it. First of all - if the enemy changed course, speed, or both, your solution would be ruined. You'd be very fastly aware of it because of the target motion prediction of the rangekeeper (which calculated position in real time) wouldn't match the observation of the target (meaning, the machine would tell you the enemy position if the data feeded to it was right - if it was not then where the machine said where the enemy should be, and where it was, would be different). You'd need to find out the new variables to keep effective fire up. Another caveat is that own ship motion mattered a lot. The same as if the enemy changed course and speed your solution would be ruined, if you changed your own, things could get pretty innacurate. Rangekeepers accounted for own ship motion, so you had to tell the machine your new motion parameters. But in the middle of a turn or a change of speed, whatever you input in a given moment is old information the next second. So whatever maneouvers your ships was to do would seriously impair the ability to hit the target. Later on (MUCH later on) rangekeepers were advanced enough to properly account for this kind of thing too. I recall reading somewhere that North Dakota in 1945 gunnery trials with her latest iteration of rangekeepers was able to keep perfectly precise gunfire at pretty long range (can't remember the details) while in the middle of the most violent maneouvers imaginable. But we're talking 1945 here - and pretty much the last generation of rangekeepers involved. For most of the duration of the big gun era, you'd better not change your ship course and speed, or your gunnery would seriously be hurt. So, with all that said (And trust me, I'm leaving litteraly a shit-ton of information unnacounted for), Directors opened an era where gunnery became a completely different ball game from what it had been. From eyeball estimations of aiming to mechanically-assisted computer generated gun solutions in a couple decades, things changed REALLY quickly once those were introduced even in their simplest form. To give a simple perspective here: -At the battle of Lissa (1866) gun laying was so innefective that ramming turned out to be the most reliable way to damage enemy ships. -At the battle of the Yalu River (1894) it's a well known fact that the chinese admiral completely lost his mind when he ordered his ships to open fire at 5000m. The japanese held their fire for a further 20minutes before they opened fire themselves from a still considered "optimistic" range at the time of 2000m or so. -At Tsushima (1905) fighting ranges were already well over 5000m with hits registered at ranges of 7000m and more. -And Jutland (1916)... the first battle where rangekeepers were present in most of the capital ships involved. Effective gun ranges tripled from Tsushima to Jutland, and that even accounting for the fact that the directors present there were pretty much the first generation of rangekeeping devices and tremendously primitive for what was judged standard only 10 years later. The capabilities of the directors with rangekeepers took almost everyone by surprise. Tsushima had already been a serious wake up call for many (and one of the main reasons why the all-big-gun battleship and the Dreadnought revolution took place), but Jutland truly turned heads around. Guns of the time were limited in range because of their limited elevations. Being restricted to 20.000 yards or so of range because your guns couldn't elevate higher wasn't seen as any kind of drawback for nobody expected any gun to reliably hit at even half that range. Then it turns out that in the daylight part of the battle of Jutland engagements at 15km were the norm. And it was effective fire, as Indefatigable, Invincible and Queen Mary could attest. The true effects of the spectacular jump in accuracy and long range capabilities directors allowed for caused a complete revamp on capital ship design standards, and a complete overhaul of naval tactics and doctrines. It was nothing short of revolutionary. What came later was obvious: rangekeepers were refined, improved, made more accurate, more reliable, more flexible to the point that expected engagement ranges doubled once again not that much after Jutland. In 1912 ships were designed with the idea of fighting maybe at 10km (and for many, that was stretching it). By 1939 engagement ranges of 30km were contemplated as perfectly viable and possible - and most of it came from the evolution of gun directors and their associated rangekeepers. The radar era added a very useful tool on top of that, particularily so when centimetric wavelenghts were introduced. But radars were nothing but information gathering devices. What you you used to aim your guns wasn't your rangefinders, be it optical or radar. Those would give you information about the enemy ship. They wouldn't tell you where to fire your guns in order to hit. It was through your plotting equipment, namely, rangekeepers, that would tell you were to aim your guns in order to have hopes of hitting the bad guys. Rangefinders usually there were a good number aboard a ship (radars if any, primary optical rangefinders, secondary optical rangefinders, and even turrets had rangefinders most of the time too. Each one less useful than the previous, but they all worked to an extent). Directors not. That equipment wasn't only insanely expensive for what it was. It was pretty heavy ,demanded extensive wiring and electrical connections. It was a neurologic center of sorts within the ship, and those aren't easy to put in the numbers. You'd usually have a main one in the main superstructure and a backup one (usually with less advanced equipment) in the aft superstructure. With the advent of directors for secondary and AAA guns (yes, those were also a thing from the 1930s onwards) those also could be used to direct the main battery in case of need, albeit, doesn't need to be said, at a reduced capability. Phwew. This ended up being far longer than what I intended. And remember - this is the ULTRA-SUPER-MEGA-HIPER-simplified version of it, leaving a lot of stuff out. And I mean ***A LOT***. But I hope for people completely unfamiliar about how this stuff worked, this somehow helps.

It is a game. Yes. That does not mean that games should be or not be what people imply by repeating the all-boring never-ending cliche of "it's a game" when they truly mean "it should give no care for whatever *I* don't want to be bothered with". There are plenty of games out there. There's variety to choose between. Those who don't want to bothered by certain aspects of realism or historical fidelity have plenty of options of games to choose from to play, before jumping into one of the very few that's, by design, not intended to be what they want, to try turn it into YET another version of what THEY want. As if there wasn't enough of that. You don't see me jumping into the WOWS forum, or any game like that, arguing from historical perspective added into the gameplay. Because it's not the intended goal of the game. It's not a secret, and that's perfectly fine, it'd be really a d*ck move for me to jump over there and begin campaigning for the game to be what's not supposed to be based only on my own personal preferences. It would be not OK. Then why do we all have to act fine and dandy when people who like games like that come to one that's intended to be different and do just that?. Now hear me out here, because I'm not trying to impose my view of how things should be or not be in a given game based only on what I want. I'm giving arguments from the explicit point of view of what the game is been said (in announcements, steam page, main web page) intends to be, which happens to be exactly the kind of game I want and enjoy from a personal perspective. I'm pushing for the game goals to be achieved, not for my own desired to be implemented. And I do that because the game intended goals include my personal interests. If they didn't I wouldn't be here - neither playing, nor giving any arguments about how it should be. I don't go to forums of games which aren't intended to suit my preferences and force-change them into exactly what I want. It's not my place to decide what a game should be - that's the decision of the designers when they begin working on a game with an intended goal. If that goal is not for my tastes I won't play it, but I won't go there trying to turn it into what I want either. But that's exactly what the legion of "It's only a game" are doing here. This game's goal (the published one at least) is what it is. Yet people come here trying to turn it into a sci-fi show, instead of an immersive believable experience, which is what it supposedly aims for. And somehow I'm supposed to not answer to them?. Why?. Now let me make something clear here - I'm ok with anyone telling what they want and desire. By any means, everyone has an opinion and a right to voice it. I'm not here to shut anyone up. Not at all. And It's not my place, nor my intention, nor my purpose to tell them they should not say what they think. That I don't go to WOWS forums trying to turn that game into something that's not intended to be doesn't mean I don't respect the right of people with different tastes than mine coming here and saying what they want and think. I do. Completely. That I present arguments against their opinions doesn't mean I dont' respect opinions - it just means I disagree with them, and that I'm more than willing as to say why. Debating someone else's opinions doesn't mean I somehow want to shut those opinions up, see. But respect towards opinions and the right of sharing them goes both ways: Meaning that the same anyone should be OK with voicing his opinions here, then he should be OK with me answering with my own opinions about what he wants within the context of what this game is intended to be (Vs what they want it to be). I'm insulting noone. I'm offending noone. I'm stating my preferences, because those match those that this game have as their goals. Otherwise I would not be here. The same I'm not in WOWS forums, the same I'm not in many other games forums. THeir goals are not of my interest, and is not my business to somehow try to coax those games' goals to suit my preferences. So, again, WHY, then, when someone does just THAT here (which he's perfectly entitled to do, even if it's something I don't), am I supposed to just shut up and not openly say I completely disagree with him?. How's that offensive?. How's that innapropiate?. And WHY should I not do it?. And yes, this is awfully offtopic by now, and is not the first time it happens. I'd love to hear your answers to my questions, though. Because it seems that somehow pushing for a game to achieve it's goal to represent reality and history in an immersive and believable way is somehow awfully wrong,but asking for every game to be turned into a sci-fi show is fine. And I'm interested in hearing out exactly WHY pushing for the later is acceptable, but defending the former is not. PS: Many games have used PR and marketing about "Realistic" experiences when they were not, and nowhere near. Like the games you mention. That many companies have indulged in misguiding marketing in the past to hook up players who don't know better doesn't mean I think THIS developer belongs to that kind of scum-like group of developers. Because I don't - when they say they want to deliver a realistic, believable, immersive experience, I trust and believe them. I'm naive like that, you see.

I truly hope nobody takes this the wrong way. And that it's understood as a personal stance and opinion, not any kind of personal attack. But I'm truly sick and tired of that sorry scapegoat of an excuse. "This is a game". So what?. It is a game that in it's description states things like "realistic", "realism" and "historical" more times than I take a sip of coffee everyday (and I'm on the verge of being a caffeine addict). Get to grips with it. Games can be intended to replicate what mattered in real life, and still be games. That something "is a game" doesn't mean it necessarily has to throw every concept that mattered in historical scenarios to the trash bin and ignore it, just for the sake of "being a game". It's obviously OK that some games ,because of their intention to be simplistic, fast paced, and easy to learn and play, go that route. Arcade games, fast paced action games, that kind of thing. It's inherent to their design and main goal as a game to just not bother with things that can slow them down or complicate them too much for the casual gamer. But a game which stated goal is to replicate the conditions and situations historical navies faced during the era of the big gun warship, it's not that it can't get away with ignoring reality, is that it DEPENDS on keeping it as a top priority and be mindful to keep it's fidelity towards reality: for the ultimate goal of a game like that is to make the player understand and play around with the decisions that mattered in a particular era, scenario, etc. If those decisions don't matter, if historic realities, limits, barriers, don't matter, then what's the point of the game?. Building ships for the sake of buildng ships using a very detailed designer that accounts for many variables that matter on real life but not in an arcade game?. How's that anywhere close to the established goal of the game to put you in the shoes of the boss of a navy of the time and let you choose which direction you take it on to see if you can do better than your historical counterparts, if most of the decisions, limits, compromises, etc, that defined that role in real life and that defined how naval warfare was fought, from the very drawing board of the engineer to the seas where navies fought, don't matter for squats here?. If a game like that (like this) doesn't give a flying eff about the reality of that era "because it's a game", then it's stated goal is pointless to begin with, and it has no reason to exist as planned. Neither as a game nor as anything else. Of course every game has to make certain compromises in the way it's shaped and presented - it's impossible to replicate all the factors that mattered in real historical scenarios in a computer game. But one thing is to compromise for the sake of porting historical-based gameplay into a computer interface and make it playable. Another is just to ignore history because "hey, it's a game". In this particular game the designer should be the first step towards establishing your fleet's strenghts and weaknesses, that later will matter in battle. If what you do there, the compromises you take, the decisions you make, the doctrine behind the design of your warships doesn't matter AT ALL because "hey, then it means wars are decided on the designer" (which can perfectly be the case, and would be a perfectly believable outcome of a war between navies with very different approaches and doctrines about naval warfare), and "It's a game", then... why the hell do we have a designer for to begin with?. What's the point of it, if you're not ready to face the consequences of the way you design your ships and navy later on in battle?. Heck, what's the point of the game as a whole then, if none of your decisions out of battle matter because "hey I don't want wars decided by anything other than what I do in battles, and I don't care that's exactly what happened in history because, hey this is a game"?. What's the point of bothering with a campaign?. What's the point of bothering with anything but "canned" scenarios then, if all that you want to matter is what you do in battle?. Again, "hey, it's a game" can fly for things as World of Warships, games intended to be fast paced action arcades that never intended to bother themselves with reality or realism. This is not that kind of game. So the blasted "hey, it's a game" does NOT fly for it. So (and here is where I mean that I hope nobody takes it as a personal attack, because it's not intended to be): stop already with the blasted universal and god-awfully repeated until madness mantra of "it's a game" applying to every game. It really got old more than a decade ago, yet it still is repeated by people as if it was some kind of ultimate universal truth, when it is not.

It's really not, because there are historical precedents of it. A couple japanese protected cruisers (the pre-dreadnought era equivalent of the light cruisers) had 8'' guns on displacements of around 4000 tons (Takasago class). One of the ships the japanese captured after the sino-japanese war (Jijuan) displaced 2300 tons, and had a couple 210mm guns. Long story short, there's not a lack of a relevant number of instances of ships that light carrying guns that big here and there. But the japanese probably take the cake out of it: their Naniwas upped the ante with a couple 10 inch guns and they didn't even displace 3500 tons. So did Izumi (and that one displaced 3000 tons). And it's not as if they were academic instances too - Izumi didn't (was bought too late to participate in the most active part of it) but the Naniwas actually fought as frontliners in a full scale war (the sino-japanese war) and gave a pretty good account of themselves in a full scale fleet engagement as important as the Battle of the Yalu River, amongst others. The Matsushima class, on a displacement that didn't reach 4500 tons at full displacement, went all up the bonkers category and carried a single 13'' gun. One that could fire once each half hour or so (not kidding) ,but as you can see, going to extremes on light hulls isn't without historical precedents.... yet 8'' guns on light cruisers is not exactly "going to extremes". 8'' guns on light cruisers certainly isn't overkill when we have right here a couple instances of protected cruisers of 3000-3500 tons displacement loading a couple 10'' guns and doing some top-class job in an all out open war as the sino-japanese one was. The bottom lining is that even if something looks overkill, or ridiculous, it doesn't mean the game shouldn't give you the chance to experiment with it and see why it actually was ridiculous on your own, and understand the reasoning behind it, though. If you want to build a Matsushima, the game should let you do it. And then find out why the idea of a 13'' gun firing each half an hour on a 4000 ton ship was a terrible one XD. As long as the game taxes you for your choices with the correct consequences for going certain "unorthodox" routes, it'll all be perfectly fine with what the game intends to do. A further thing to clear here is that cruiser development in the interwar era was completely conditioned by the naval treaties, both Washington and London. You might think that something called a "light cruiser" shouldn't have guns bigger than 6 inches...but that's because no light cruiser of the era did. And no light cruiser of the era did because treaties forbade it from happening... Yet we have very interesting instances of non-signatary navies building quite interesting designs which can't be truthfully classed as anything other than light cruisers with guns quite larger than 6 inches. Like the soviet Kirov - a class that according to the London Treaty would be classed as a heavy cruiser if only because of the 180mm caliber of her main guns - but one with a level of protection that would make many a light cruiser proud. Another instance? the US Pensacola class. Not widely known but the first 8'' gunned "modern" cruiser the US ever built was designed as, built as, and initially classed as... a light cruiser. While carrying 10x8in guns (and pretty powerful ones at that). The reason?... her armor would make a soda can look like a bunker. But once the London Treaty was signed, enforcing the separation between "heavy" and "light" cruisers based on gun caliber alone, the whole class had to be reclassed. So designed as, built as and initially classed as light cruisers...yet those ships lived the rest of their careers as "heavy cruisers". Because not for any practical reason, but for a bureocratic one (a naval treaty is nothing other than that). Yet they still were built as light cruisers, and they were comissioned as such. Had no treaty gotten on the way, you'd had a light cruiser with ten 8'' guns. And other navies would've been only too quick in coming back with their own answers to that ship - it's plain to see that in half a decade we'd seen light cruisers with 8'' guns being pretty much the standard. But the London Treaty got in the way, and those ships happened all the same - just labelled as "heavy cruisers" instead. Because of a treaty. The pointers are clearly out there to show that had no treaty messed up with the natural way things were shaping up for cruisers after WW1, light cruisers would've ended carrying guns quite larger than the standard 6'' the treaties enforced. The British Hawkins class was pretty much a dead giveaway of the trend; that the americans went a step beyond with the Pensacola (10x8in battery in a cruiser is no joke, and I insist, that class was intended to be "light cruisers") is just the clearcut proof of the way things were shaping up for that class. Another hint we can take from what happened when the treaties stopped being a thing. Once WW2 started and treaty considerations thrown through the window, the trend of heavy cruiser construction was clearcut - suddenly super-cruisers began being a thing. From the japanese B-65 project to the Alaska Class, we can see that the one and only reason "heavy cruisers" of the WW2 era shaped up to be like they were was because naval treaties restricted everyone from upscaling them prior to the war - even while that was exactly which is what everyone wanted to do: making them bigger because 10k tons were just not enough to fill the role they were supposed to fill. And 8'' guns weren't, really, big enough either. The de-facto death (or at least discredit) of the Battlecruiser at Jutland, mixed with the later blending of the battlecruiser and battleship into the Fast Battleship of the 30s left a wide open role that some class had to fill. The same one armored cruisers took before the BC was a thing, the same one the BC took when they were a thing, the same one the Heavy Cruiser took because nothing bigger than 10k ton displacement was allowed without being labelled a capital ship by the treaties. That of a fast, heavily armed, reasonably armored, class able to station themselves up at a good distance from the van of the battleline, act as scouting forces, and engage and defeat the enemy's own scouting forces. That nothing bigger than the "treaty" heavy cruisers took that role before WW2 was, again, because of the treaties. Without those we'd seen "alaskas" or "B-65s" way before: ships labelled as cruisers but displacing almost as much as a WW1 battleships, armed with guns of 10,11, 12 inches of caliber or even more. The Naval Armaments agreement at Washington didn't happen just to put a leash on capital ship building - it very specifically targetted cruisers aswell because those were also felt that without check, would grow out very quickly into something very different, far more powerful (and far costlier) than what the WT and London Treaty ended up enforcing. Without those treaties the "heavy cruiser" would've never existed. Certainly not in the way and shape it did. They'd ended up being what today we know as "supercruisers", but 20 years earlier. and in a world like that "light cruisers" with 8'' guns certainly don't look unreasonable at all. They didn't look unreasonable in 1930 when USS Pensacola and USS Salt Lake City were comissioned as such, after all. Did they? ;).

If there's one thing keeping me away from age of sail is precisely, being forced to play a general in a game that's titled "ultimate ADMIRAL". Granted that's particularily aggraviating for me personally because I find ground tactics of the musket era as fun and interesting as watching paint dry, so the reason why I just can't really enjoy UA:AoS it's quite the personal thing for me and I can see how others find it enticing, or desirable. But in a game like this is a much more complicated thing than in AoS. The problem with ground combat in a game like this is not only how complex it is because of how much more involved modern ground combat it is compared with the old muzzleloader era tactics - it's because ground tactics evolved as much if not more as warship desigs from the 1880 era the game supposedly will begin in, up to the 1950s or so I guess the campaign will cover up to. It's a huge undertaking, in fact, worthy of a game on it's own, let alone how complex it would be to properly add to a game like this. One has to remember that in the UA:Age of Sail title (which IIRC spans from the 1770s era wars up to the napoleonic wars) the game covers a period where neither naval nor ground technology advanced that much comparatively speaking. Sure, technology advanced but it was at most evolutionary stuff, not revolutionary. Naval tactics and designs of the 1780s were almost the same as naval tactics and designs of the 1810s. Ditto with ground troops and how they fought. Yet in UA:Dreadnoughts we're dealing to an exceedingly complex game here from the naval standpoint alone, a game that has to accurately cover and portray ships from the early pre-dreadnought era up to the very late superbattleship era, with the massive changes the advancing technology meant at both the design levels, doctrine aspects, and actual tactical employement of fleets. Truly revolutionary advances that completely changed the way naval warfare was fought. And the game has to accurately simulate and represent it all. That's a massive undertaking on it's own ,let alone to add the also tremendously complex side of land warfare to the ecuation, and that's something Age of Sail does not have to really bother itself too much with. And that's without even factoring it air power. Which will have to be done at some point, maybe in a DLC; maybe in a second implementation of the game (hopefully if it sells well, that I really hope it does), and which is far more important for a game of this scope that simulating amphibious operations where the player has to command land troops. As a sidenote, the role of an admiral wouldn't be commanding amphibious troops. At most his role would be the task of escorting them to the landing area, protecting them, and provide for naval artillery support. But the soldiers would be commanded, led, and given orders by generals. Marine corp generals, maybe, so navy officers in the end - but still generals. Not admirals. So, adding to the immense and numerous layers of complexity that it's just properly getting the naval portion of the game right, yet another one with ground invasions where you must also handle troops...personally is a "no please". Being as open as I can be I'd just say "get the whole naval portion completed first, then get the air power part done, completed and working, and THEN, maybe, think about amphibious units. But there's a very vast, long, and complicated road before that stage is ever reached.

I'm fine with that. You do less, you get less men on the line of fire too (and less you have to replace so you have less things to spend money on), so your rewards should be accordingly smaller. It all sounds like perfectly reasonable from this end.

That's wonderful news, at least for me. I really don't care for musket era land battle tactics. I really don't, and not for a lack of trying to get used to them and find them interesting. And really, being forced into commanding large ground forces in the game is totally killing the fun of the game for me, which is really a shame because I can't love the naval combat implementation more. It's the best (by far and wide stretch) naval strategy game of the age of sail ever made and the idea of not being able to enjoy that because I can't stand the land combat portion of the game really soured me. So knowing I can choose not to have to bother about that part can't make me happier :). Looking forward to it.

And someone here obviously doesn't know how to read, or process what he's read...or (more probably) is answering to something he hasn't read at all. Please re-read my posts again. Specifically the part where I say "sure, bring them on, but make them as costly, horribly expensive, and massively impractical, as they were in real life". You still can go for the memes. But it'll cost you. As it should. Also: If those designs are anywhere near viable efficiency and cost wise, and don't suffer from the inevitable logistical and strategic limitations that ships that size entail, the AI will also use them. If the AI also uses them, then the game de facto will be forcing ME to use them too, in order to keep at least equality in the naval arms race vs enemy nations in the campaign. I'll end up having to build a fleet of completely unbelievable ships in order to just keep pace with the AI. And that would completely ruin the immersion and believability of a campaign that's intended to put you in the shoes of being the boss of a fleet, and your decisions and compromises, tradeoffs and design doctrines, having significance as years pass, the same way they did for real fleets of the time. And if the (immense) compromises of going and building ships of that insane size are not implemented, then the whole point of playing the campaign is lost. So pls stop trying to argue for sci-fi stuff that would completely ruin the immersion and realistic feeling of a game intended to be, well, realistic, just because you want to have what-if fun. I'm not against it, if you want to go for the memes all the power for you, but the game should make you pay the according price for designing ships so large as to be completely impractical. Bottom point: I'm opposite to any implementation of ships of such a size that don't make any sense whatsoever from the cost/efectiveness side of things, not to mention the strategic logistical implications and limitations imposed for the kind of stuff ships that size would've demanded, without the game represencing, and forcing down on the player (and the AI) the accordingly immense dues to pay for building and operating such monsters. I don't say "forbid them". I do say "make them so ludicrous as they would've been in reality". You're still free to go for that kind of stuff, the same you'll be still free to go for completely impractical designs if you want to (for instance if you want to build a ship with no turrets facing forward and three facing backs, an "anti-nelson" of sorts, nothing is stopping you but have fun in battle with such an abomination), but you'll have to pay the according price of your choices in both cases. Which is kinda the point of the campaign, after all.

This I already mentioned in my post (last paragraph). Yes, the radar being KO allowed DoY to move relatively close without Scharnhorst knowing until she opened fire. Had that radar been operational she'd known something rather big was lurking and coming close. Now, wether the contact would've been correctly ID'd as a battleship or not is a whole different story. Weather conditions were truly miserable and radar while much better than Mk.I eyeball in those conditions still gets affected - specially so if your radar set has a limited resolution as the german naval radar did. But yes, lacking radar did likely make a difference in that particular phase. But what I adressed in my post is that in the actual fighting portion of the battle (the slugging-out phase), Scharnhorst having radar vs not having radar made no difference. As it was, the german ship was firing at gun flashes with no hope of spotting the shot nor correcting it. With radar she'd have had at least access to more reliable rangefinding information, but she'd been as unable to correct the shot as she was without any radar at all. So the end result would've likely been the same anyway.

Got this some months back, tried to give it several chances...sorry but it's a no go. I'll be brief in why. The title of the game is Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail Note the big size font, underscore and italics. Notice the word. See, If I wanted to play a game about land battles of the musket era, I wouldn't be looking for one that says "Admiral" in the name. I can't be bothered with land combat - I find it boring, tiresome, highly unnatractive and in general something I just don't enjoy. I did play Ultimate GENERAL: Gettysburg (note the caps), I can aknowledge it's a good game but just not for me. Because tactics of the musket era I just can't find entertaining. When I saw this in the works I thought "wow, must be good" (Specially coming from a company which developed NA, which for any fault anyone can put on it, nobody can say it doesnt' have brilliant combat mechanics). The sad part - it IS good. The naval combat side of this game is just awesome. But that you're forced to partake in full scale land battles?. Nope, that is not. Limited scope ones?. Raids with a handful dozens of men? well sure, why not. But being pretty much forced to fight Bunker Hill?. What the heck?. Since when a game about naval combat throws you into a full fledged scale ground battle?. And don't get me started with that english campaign mission about stealing gold. First, a pretty hard naval fight (ok, hey this is what I signed for, loved every bit of it). But then you have to land forces to find out 600 spanish guys entrenched in a town (with awful pathing, btw, there are several parts of that town where it seems you should be able to pass through to access the town mid plaza, yet your troops refuse to), to then find out that you have to turn to a chapel to fight another 200 (plus reinforcements if you're not in time and UNLESS you have foreknowledge of it, you won't be), to THEN be forced to run across again...to find out a further 600 spanish fresh dudes coming in nonchalantly. Jesus, I can vouch, had we spaniards had that kind of defenses everywhere in america we'd won every single war against the british singlehandedly. Yet the most notable victories we had were in overwhelming inferiority (looking at you ,Cartagena de Indias), yet in this game seems the spanish have garrisons of 2000 men in every forgotten town in the bloody continent. I'm sorry ,a landing operation for a fast raid with a handful of marines I'm ok with. Full fledged battles you have to undertake with ridiculously limited forces it's not what I'm looking for in a game that is supposed to be about NAVAL combat. Specially not when the campaign is not dynamic but canned missions; further specially not when so many times I'm not really doing anything with ships, but rather with land troops (fighting a style of warfare I find boring to the extreme), and even more so when the mission design and script means the opponent is MASSIVELY stacked in forces to make your life absolutely miserable all the time. I'm storing this one for checking in the future - maybe at some point there's a dynamic gamemode truly centered about what naval games should be about: naval combat. For the time being, I'm putting this one in the box of "hugely promising but ultimately failed" titles. It's a damned shame because again, the naval combat part of it is so very well done. But I'll insist one more: a game about naval combat has no busines throwing you in the middle of land battles. That's what "ultimate GENERAL" is for. And once more, note the caps.

I think the most pressing matter is different. While the points made in this thread thus far are valid and need adressing and attention, I still think the armor model urgently needs a rework in the way it's supposed to work. In the pictures avobe you can see the hull is represented by a series of rectangles, 7 in lenght, 3 in height, which combined as a 3x7 "box" represent the hull. Out of those, the extreme 2x3 "boxes" represent the ship's ends ("extended" areas) while the central 3x3 represents the citadel, or main armored area. Avobe them there's a set of thinner rectangles representing the decks avobe each area. Avove that - it's superstructure and guns already. Focusing on the 3x7 "box", currently the armor model covers each of those sections with the ammount you input in the relevant section of "belt armor" in the designed. Meaning, what you input as "belt" is what covers the WHOLE of the 3x3 central area. What you input as "belt extended" is what covers the WHOLE of the two 2x3 "end" areas. And this is completely bonkers. Belt armor was just that - BELT armor. Which means that the ship had a, well, a "Belt" roughly in the area of the waterline, where armor would be that thick. Out of those areas, armor would be either FAR less thick...or almost unexistant (plating levels at most), depending on the armor doctrine used on the ship (incremental vs AoN). In practical terms you'd end up with max armor on your waterline, a few feet avobe it, a few feet under it (depending on the height of the belt, another very important parameter the damage doesn't represent at all right now, and which should in the future). Out of those areas then you'd have to choose what to put as protection. It's what was called the "Upper" belt - areas that covered the hull from the main belt up to the top of the hull. Which ,out of sheer necessity of making ships float, couldn't be covered in the same kind of armor thicknesses as the main belt, lest the sheer weight of that armor would make the ship both unstable...AND...unfloatable. Under the belt you'd have the Torpedo Defence System, which out of necessity, couldn't be cladded in external armor of any thickness. Yet in the game what you set as your belt is what covers your whole hull. And that has distinct, significant, and really problematic consecuences in the battle performance of armored ships. My proposal - outside of the scope of a complete revamp of the armor layout system (Which I honestly think is warranted long term as this simplified model can make do as a placeholder but needs a lot more detail if the game intends to realistically represent the challenges of effectively armoring big battleships) would be that, given that the current "Box" is three "rectangles" in height those rectangles should be treated as follows: Bottom rectangles are under-water sections of the hull. Those should represent areas that torpedoes would hit, or diving shells, but no avobe-water hits could reach. And should be treatly mostly as unarmored sections (which in practice, they mostly were) where the player is barred from putting any armor (outside of internal antitorpedo internal bulkheads that should be represented in the antitorpedo selection box) Top rectangles are upper hull sections. Those should represent the hull area from the belt up to the main deck, thickness of protection to be selected by the designer (IE, the player) in the design screen under two new boxes: "upper belt" and "extended upper belt" - to represent the relevant parts of the main central area, and the hull's ends respectively. Mid rectangles are the waterline. Those should represent the actual hull waterline and area where the main (and extended) belt actually was present in historical designs. Nominal armor as introduced in the designer right now. Currently the designer is using calculations for the weight of the belt armor which are right for a belt, but then the game is using that protection thickness for the whole side hull. That's just not how things ought to be. And that should be, IMO, one of the current top priorities in the game development to adress, because it's really a problem in-battle with end-on fire engagements and long range impacts which hit the upper side of the hull, but not the deck nor the belt, hits that should go "in" and are just deflected because the game represent an armor thickness on those areas that shouldn't be there to begin with. Once that's covered then more evolved changes to account for internal stuff should be adressed. But let's start building the house from the basement and not from the roof here - with the armor model as it stands, the suggested changes in this thread thus far won't adress the main issue the armor model in place currently has.

That's a quite minor problem with battleships with turrets weighing thousands of tons. It was more a matter of displacement efficiency and damage control. Battleships from the end of WW1 were expected to fight at ranges well out of torpedo range - hence putting torpedoes on them seemed like both a waste of useful deck space and of useful displacement that could be used elsewhere on other features that actually were to matter in those long range encounters. On the other hand there's the fact that having a (by force) largely unprotected set of extremely high flammable/explosive stuff wide open on your hull's deck in a ship designed to slug it out against other ships didn't look like the safest approach possible. A good hit on a deck torpedo launcher could set off their warheads, and the resulting detonation wouldn't probably be lethal for ships that big, but they would be enough to cause pretty sizeable craters on their former existing position. Which obviously wouldn't do very good things to the ship fighting ability (not to mention the safety of it's crew). Both things mixed up meant that nobody bothered putting those things on battleships. We all know the germans kinda did with the Twins, Tirpitz, and later on the projected H designs - but the motivation behind those torpedoes was different as they were intended to be weapons against enemy transports for their raider role, saving main gun ammo (and main battery rifle wear) on ships that didn't justify main battery shell expenditure. And for all intents and purposes those mounts were actually wasted space and tonnage anyway even for those ships. So, there's that too.

End-on engagements are a nuisance indeed. The primary problem lays with the way the armor model seems to be implemented. Instead of "belt" protections we have "side" protections. That means all the external volume of the warship is covered on nominal belt armor thickness, when it should be only the areas close to the waterline (the upper areas of the hull being protected by thinner "upper" armor). As a result achieving reliable penetrations from high angles is terribly problematic because ships are far more protected than what they really could be. I don't have a problem with the way the structural damage is represented. A shell detonating on an already mauled compartment shouldn't do much to the overall ship structure - what was there to be destroyed and weakened, is already weakened and destroyed after all. But mixed with the armor model this leads to highly problematic scenarios where killing off fleeing enemies is far more difficult than what it should be. It's not something with a fast fix, however. The game needs a more detailed, more realistic, armor model in place for that; and that can't happen overnight. While I'm sure it's something that will happen in the future at some point (can't have a truly realistic naval game with the armor model we currently have - it kinda works for a placeholder to an extent, but this can't be the final shape of things), it's not an easy task to accomplish. What I'd do as a temporary "fix", or at least to mitigate it, is to force the AI to stay and fight until their ship is far more damaged than as what it is right now. At the moment in 1v1 engagements when the AI is down to 50%-ish structure, it turns tails.Having AI being smart enough to know when to try to break of action instead of being a suicidal "fight till the end" it's a good feature, in all honesty, but doesn't mix well with the current state of things. So until a new armor model is in place, toy with that threshold a bit, lower it to 25% structure before the AI tries to disengage. Structural damage seriously hampers top speed, and fleeing ships will be much easier to catch and finish that way. Again, placeholder "patch" for a problem originated by a placeholder armor model. A true fix can't be introduced until the final armor model is in place. But yeah, it gets seriously annoying at times so something temporary should be done to at least make those stern chases much shorter and far less tedious than what they currently are.

Not really. While it requires a lot of careful placement, viable cross-deck firing wing turrets is perfectly doable:

That's HMS Hood. And by Jove, she looks gorgeous.

Once again: and let's see if the readers get it: Radar is *******NOT****** a FCS. Radar is ******NOT****** a director. Knocking out radar is NOT knocking out a director (The same knocking out a rangefinder is not knocking out a director). Radar is a means of detection and in some sets, rangefinding (more or less accurate, depending on the model, wavelenght, power output, etc). WWII radar was, best case scenario (allied centimetric wavelenght sets) the electronic all-weather equivalent of an optical rangefinder. That is NOT a fire control system. A fire control system, or Director, was a station with plenty of equipment for plotting fire. Plotting fire means: you input range, course, speed, bearing of the target (alongside many other things as own ship speed and course, temperature, wind speed, barometric pressure, etc), and the plotters give you a fire solution. If you knock the main rangefinders off a ship she'll have some trouble estimating distance as accurately as if intact, but that's why battleship had backup rangefinders on the aft superstructure, some also had rangefinders for AAA and secondary batteries that could double for primary battery use in case the mains were knocked out... and if every one of those was KO too, then there were the rangefinders on the turrets themselves. But no, rangefinder does NOT equal FCS. Knocking out the rangefinders of a ship does NOT equaly knocking out the FCS. To knock out the FCS you had to hit the director itself - which still was out of the main armored citadel so could be done, but they weren't as exposed as the rangefinders (or the radar aerials). As for Scharnhorst. First of all, her FCS wasn't knocked out (hence, your answer is not an instance of what I was talking about in the quote you posted), her radar was. Just like South Dakota's radar was KO in Guadalcanal, yet her FCS was intact and ready to go. To follow, Scharnhorst's radar not the same as the allied sets of the period. German naval sets down to the very last days of the war (when a few centimetric ones entered service, but of course in no major surface units as all had been either sunk or were unseaworthy by that stage) operated on decimetric wavelenghts, and operated on oscilloscope screens, not PPI (as many allied centimetric sets did since 1943). Now: other of the good things of having an optical rangefinding is that you not only estimate the range to the enemy, it's high magnification is very useful to spot the fall of shot. By seeing where your shots fall you know if your solution is off and by how much (which is data that also goes to the rangekeeper plotting machines in the directors to refine the shot). In naval gunnery: if you couldn't see your fall of shot, you couldn't correct your solution, so you would be firing blanks. Literally hail mary shots. Radar sets were very different between each other (they still are). A given set would have certain capabilities depending on it's characteristics. In this case what we're looking for is resolution. Or how accurate a picture the radar "paints" in it's return signal. With low resolution you can pick a signal but only have very rough estimation of ranges, with a rather large margin of error. For some applications this does not matter (Early warning radars, for instance, you only want to know if something's out there and roughly where). With high resolution you can literally paint a map with your radar (in fact some radar sets do just that...and they're called, quite unimaginativelly, ground mapping radars). Now the question would be, then why not go for high resolution radars, all the time?. Answer - resolution depends on signal power output (the more power, the better return you get), but also on signal wavelenght. Signal wavelenght is inverse to the wave frequency. Hence if you want a really small wavelenght, you need a very high frequency. And high frequencies have serious range limitations. First, because high frequency electromagnetic signals tend to be absorbed by the transmitting medium very quickly - the wave itself doesn't reach very far before being dissipated. And second, in the timeframe we're talking about, because a radar set would be tuned to emit-listen. Emit a signal, wait for the return, emit the next one. If the signal returns after the next one has been emitted, the information will be bogus and nonsensical (you'd be getting phantom returns at very close range). So in high frequency radars of WWII, range was quite limited - the higher the frequency, the less real range your set could have. Nowadays with phased array radars that's not a problem, btw, but it was very real back in the 1940s. So why not go for high resolution radars, all the time?. Well, because if you did, then you'd have no set with range beyond a very short radius. So you'd tailor your set for your need. EW radars with long wavelenghts and very long range, but poor resolution. And point-targetting high definition radars with short wavelenghts, but high resolution. So in general for detection purposes you'd usually have 2 sets. One with long wavelenght (low frequency, long range) for early warning, another one with short wavelenght, for precise information. A good instance of it it's the Freya-Wüzburg combo used by the germans for their Reich Defense detection belts. The problem is...the german short wavelenght equipment was well behind allied sets. Simply stated, it emitted at not enough of a high frequency nor short enough wavelenght. to emit on very small wavelenghts in the 1940s you needed something the germans thought was an engineering impossibility...until they found out it was not when looking at captured allied centimetric sets. I'll save the explanation and space - it was the magnetron, the invention of which gave the allies access to centimetric wavelenght radar when the germans were restricted to decimetric, and which was KEY in enabling the allies to do something the germans never could: Truly real, effective, radar-guided naval blind firing. Centimetric wavelenghts (combined with PPI projections) allowed the operator to get distinct, recognizable, individual, returns out of both the contact AND the shot splashes. The radar operator could both "range find", and "spot the shot". There was no need for a guy actually watching the shells falling - the radar return was clear enough to provide for that. Decimetric wavelenghts did not. Their resolution was too coarse to differentiate the target from the splashes. You still needed a guy on the optical equipment of the ship spotting the shot. If there was none, or if the weather conditions were adverse, or if was night time...you're outta luck, you can't spot the shot even if you have your radar set in working order. Technically that still allows for "blind fire" with a radar like that. But it'd not be real blind fire, but shooting hail marys. It'd be as much as firing blanks as it'd be firing optically without bothering about spotting the shot. That's not "blind firing", that's just "shoot for the sake of shooting". This mammoth text is a very long explanation to tell you that Schanrhorst's radar being disabled didn't change much. Probably the one thing that did was to enable DoY to come close enough to open fire (with her own blind fire radar set) without Scharnhorst noticing. But once the gunfire engagement began the germans couldn't return fire accurately...with or without radar. As it was they were aiming at gun flashes. With radar they'd be aiming at pips on an oscilloscope. In neither case the german operators could spot the fall of shot - so while being slightly less hopeless, having radar would've changed nothing in the final engagement: Scharnhorst would still have not been able to hit the broad side of a barn, even if inside one.

In one hand, You've used words as "anihilate", "holed and exploded", and similar superlatives in this thread. Which just make no sense given the actual damaging potential of the guns you're talking. And which are conductive to, and implicitly entail, the concept of destroying the enemy ship. Something those guns couldn't really do against massive capital ships designed to stand damage from guns far larger than those we're talking about. On the other hand, you didn't say "sink", but the problem reported here and that has originated this discussion, is that those guns DO sink ships that size. Something they shouldn't really be able to do, certainly not to the scale they're able to do it in game. No. Non penetrating AP hits do not do any damage. They just bounce off. That small gun AP does damage it shouldn't against ships they shouldn't is because the game gives small guns too much penetration. And it's not a "balance" mechanic. Because such a thing does not exist for a game like this. The only balance in this game will be it's realistic game mechanics (at least if I've got that right from the webpage announcement about it, and the published official descriptions, which exactly state that much when it describes how the game will have realistic damage models, realistic gunnery models, and realistic tactics). If small guns in real life weren't able to do something, in the finished game here, they won't either. That's the "balance" a game intended to be a realistic simulation has to offer. No, "any naval gun" could not do that. 40mm of plating would be enough to keep out guns of 2'', 3'' and 4'' of caliber at any range beyond 5000m (with the exception of the american 4''/50 Mk9, which could BARELY go through a couple of inches of armor at 5000m). Also, you're going to have to define what you mean by "Exploding". Because exploding, in common vernacular, means "blowing up". And you'd be hard pressed to blow up the whole bow or rear of a battleship using 5'' guns. And by hard pressed I mean you'd spend your whole destroyer magazine on a battleship's bow, and you'd end up with an enemy with a lot of holes, and still a pretty much structurally intact bow. As for "saturate", thats yet another term that comes from nowhere...other than certain arcade naval game we all have heard about, and which has no real meaning in any serious naval talk. So you're going to have to define, or translate, that word, for everyone to understand exactly what you mean with it. Because if what you mean with it is, again, causing structural collapse of either bows or sterns of 35000+ ton warships with 5'' guns or smaller, no, that was not possible either. Bismarck's FCS was knocked out - yes. That in general impairs the accuracy of an enemy, yes. To "practically win already" you're going to need a lot more than that though. Because that Bismarck's FCS was knocked out didn't silence her (by battleship fire, incidentally, I'd like you to show a single instance of a battleship's directors being knocked out by small caliber gunfire, because it never happened. And no, directors do not mean "rangefinders" nor "radar". Directors is the place where all the rangekeeper plotting equipment is installed, and from where fire control solutions are originated). What silenced Bismarck wasn't that the FCS was knocked out - was that her four turrets were blown apart. And subsequently, the secondaries. All that damage was done by battleship caliber gunfire. Once she was a sitting silent wreck is when the cruisers joined the party. Again, good luck doing that kind of job with 5'' guns or smaller.

Agreed, this has been suggested many times. To at least make them placeable elsewhere with the use of the shift key, the same way the main turrets are treated. I'm sure sooner or later it'll happen ;).

To further proof the kind of thing I'm trying to say here, I'm attaching a picture with all the damage USS South Dakota took during the battle of Guadalcanal. Its a total of more than 18 hits from 5'' to 8'' guns on the superstructure of the ship alone (more if we count hull hits). It knocked radar offline and caused some holes, and splinter and superficial damage at most. Yet other than KOing the radar and inducing electrical problems (Which as I have shown before, were caused by the ship defective electrics, not because of the hits themselves) all those hits achieved nothing. Structurally that superstructure was just fine. Needed some patching up to tape all the holes and splinter damage, of course. There were men injured, hurt, and killed by that gunfire. Some light AA mounts were KO'd. Obviously it'd caused some trouble for the crew moving along those places. But the ship was perfectly fine otherwise from all those hits. Combat-wise the only reason South Dakota was crippled was because she crippled herself by having a faulty electrical system. The over-reliance of the gunnery crews on radar also played a part - but their optical fire control systems were operational so the ship was still fully combat capable anyway. The picture here shows a ship that was subjected to a hailstorm of light and medium caliber gunfire from pretty short ranges...yet the picture shows a far, far, far, cry from the "exploded superstructures" some people are talking about around here. But it seems that now, for whatever reason, some people think that 5'' and 8'' gunfire could nuke off the superstructure of a 35000t ship. Just because they think they should, based on absolutely nothing solid. The TL:DR of this, again would be that small and medium guns could deal superficial damage big ships that could somewhat impair their fighting ability. But no, they could not "explode" or "Annihilate" them...nor any of their parts, with gunfire alone.

None of them "holed end exploded bow or stern" would cause the ship to sink. Proof enough of it is that enough ships came back to port with bows or sterns ripped by torpedoes but very much affloat (and in conditions of firing their guns if needed). Yet in game those guns outright sink ships they had no business in sinking. You can argue all you want about it, that's not correct, and that should not be that way. BTW, no destroyer or cruiser ever "holed and exploded" any big warship bow, nor stern, if it wasn't through the direct impact of a torpedo. Their gunnery simply didn't have enough power to do anything close to those levels of structural damage. Again - their gunfire could damage bigger ships, yes. But "anihilate", no, they could not at all. A ship with "exploded rangefinders" switch to secondary director. If secondary director is destroyed they switch to local rangefinding (most turrets had in-built rangefinders on their own). THey would go on fighting at reduced efficiency but they COULD aim. So no, you would't have "effectively destroyed the ship". To destroy a ship you have to sink the ship, or reduce it to total silence. Small guns could not do either against big armored warships. As for your rather poor attempt at a personal attack I'm just going to ignore it. You choose to go there, you'll be the only one doing so, buddy.

The game already models directors and control tops that if destroyed hurt accuracy a lot. So you don't need to model small guns as turbolasers to "emulate" that. They're already in the game. The point the message you're quoting made is that, opposite to what several people have posted here, small guns were unable to "anihilate" big warships. Damage, yes. Impair their combat efficiency, yes. Outright massacre them, NO.

There were many 8'' marks in US Service. The baseline was the Mk9 , yes, but what came later up to be the llater Mk13 or Mk.14s, they were essentially the same gun. THe difference mostly coming from having either a partially chrome-plated or a fully chrome-plated bore. At any rate the Mk9 was the basic 8'' many other US 8'' marks were designed to look like. And the Mk9 shells could pen the same 10'' of armor it's Mk14 sibling could...only this one could do it from 1000 yards less (10in penetration@9000yards). Which is not as good....but it's still comparable to the german 20.3cm gun. http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_8-55_mk9.php

Before the hotfix the problem was HE not doing much against armored ships because of how the armor system is designed. AP was perfectly fine. Hence, the problem wasn't with the guns. The problem is with a simplified armor model that, at some point, will have to be revised to be a lot more detailed, as currently areas that should be vulnerable to medium caliber HE (4 to 6 inch) aren't so much so. So what wasn't working before is still not working. And on top of that we have small guns acting like coilguns. Not saying that what was before was perfect - but it was a better state overall, as less things were broken. as for the historical comments: 240mm at 10km for a 203mm AP shell is not that impressive. American 8''/55 Mk 14s could penetrate 10'' of armor from the same distance, and the Mk12, 13 and 15 were more or less their ballistic equals. It may seem like quite the achievers if you compare them with very early pre-WWI 12'' penetrations (which were 10-11'' or so at similar ranges), but it's just the progression of technology on AP caps that happened since WW1 what makes the difference. At any rate the german 8'' wasn't any special in it's vertical penetration performance, and was decidedly inferior to american 8'' guns in horizontal deck penetrations in long range plunging fire (mostly because the latter were using superheavy projectiles fired at slower MVs). I wasn't debating Bismarck's loss to small guns either. In your previous post you seemingly pointed out that it was the medium and small calibers that did most of the heavylifting at the time of rendering the ship a soft kill (silenced). It was not the case. What silenced Bismarck was battleship artillery. Then the cruisers came and joined the party with their smaller guns without fear of retribution - small guns, which, even then in the overall scope of things didn't really do that much compared with the scale of destruction the 356mm and 406mm shells from KGV and Rodney did on the ship. Essentially you could've deleted the cruisers from that engagement, taken them away from the british side, and the battle would've ended exactly as it did. That's no spectacular performance from cruiser caliber guns to use as an instance of how useful they were, yet you used it as an instance of exactly that. As for her scuttling, it's one of those things that tend to misguide people. Bismarck was already embarking thousands of tons of water before that last engagement even began. And by the time the scuttling order was issued, she was already sinking - it was only a matter of time. What sank that ship was british naval gunnery (and a lucky aerial torpedo hit) - the scuttling was little more than a sidenote in the overall scope of things. Even if it was a significant act of bravery from the part of the crew, which it was, it really was a mere anechdote. As for your errors, no need to ask anyone for forgiveness ;). That's what forum answers and quotes are for - to adress things that may be wrong and set the record straight about them ;). Still is good practice to do a fast fact-check on internet while writting off memory because otherwise you end up writting things that just aren't true. I know it myself, I tend to write posts off memory all the time and have to force myself to double-check what I'm saying just in case I'm remembering it wrong.

Actually it wouldn't be this way. RTW does it very well - there's a tab called "Doctrines" where you can detail the specific loadout of your warships by size, class, etc. Also you do set doctriines of what kind of ammo to be fired to what - but that shouldn't be needed here as battles are a much more "hands on" affair. Ammunition types should be indeed separate - and not only that, magazines too. If the magazine of a turret ran out of ammo, that was it for that turret in that engagement. Well, mostly. There were exceptions to that but they came with pretty dangerous design tradeoffs...the standard would be more or less what I stated.

I'm sorry but categorical statements which are not only false but backed by no proof - quite the opposite, there's plenty of evidence of ships being still able to fight after being riddled with small caliber holes - don't help at all in debates like this. No, small guns couldn't (so, shouldn't) "annihilate the bow and stern on AoN ships. For one the actual damaging capability against the structure of big ships of guns that small was really limited. For other, most AoN designs did have armor in the extremities. Some more, some less, but even the ones with the least, while not having much armor in those areas, they had enough to deal with splinters from near misses. And that plating was more than enough to stop 2 or 3 inch guns too Not to mention that the AoN concept came hand to hand with the citadel raft concept. You could puncture the extremities of AoN ships until the point everything out of the citadel was flooded, yet those ships were designed so they'd still would have more than enough reserve buoyancy within their citadel to stay afloat without problem even in such a scenario. Also to set "the entire upper decks" of a battleship "ablaze", you're going to need a helluva lot of small guns. Not just the handful of a couple destroyers. As to "upper decks missing", I have to insist that those 5, 4, 3 and 2 inch guns weren't shooting nukes nor black matter. They shot pretty normal HE of the time, which was nowhere near enough to "vaporize" the upper sections of a massive warship as a battleship. Damage, yes. But not "anihilate" anything.