Citadel rework suggestion

[Tankaxe]

Greeting and today I would like start the topic of citadels

The way they are represented is disappointing and the only thing they do is reduce chances for magazine and engine room hits with an eye boggling amount of weight costs. Really I think they should be simplified and similar to what Rule the Waves did and limit it to three armor schemes: protected cruiser, sloped deck and flat deck(can be researched to be All or Nothing). 

Now this isn't just what is needed but what is required is citadel placements. Currently the players can space gun turrets nearly to the ends of the bow and stern which makes ships quite comical. So my suggestion is that funnels and gun turrets are all connected to each other as a citadel. The farther apart the funnels (which represent machinery space) and gun turrets the longer the citadel and the heavier they'll be. The players can control the citadels placement by just having its funnels and armnements together or farther apart. To prevent shenanigans, turreted secondaries must be placed in the citadel.

This will the force the players, just as IRL ship designers, to make the ship more compact so the smaller the area the less weight is spent armoring the ships vitals and more armor can be placed over it. Everything outside the citadel is essentially Belt and Deck extended which are still important to protect from flooding and other damage with pre-AoN armor schemes.

All or Nothing essentially focuses the protection of ship to one spot of the ship leaving BE and DE to 0". What makes it more unique is the that the ship will not ever take flotation damage unless the citadel is penetrated.

Now to get this working Players need much more freedom on placement of guns, superstructure and funnels so they aren't forced to have everything apart.

Now hulls are interesting, most of what we have didnt have either sloped deck or AoN designs. For an example some of some of the early hulls we have could be quite restrictive to placements that would make AoN unappealing because of how far your forced to spread out everything. So an easy fix is to have equipping different citadels allows you to choose between different hull types.

These are my thoughts and I will be happy to extend this idea for discussion

[Mycophobia]

Overall I like the idea, I suggest for ease of player understanding, each turret create a visible turret barbette going down into the ship on the bulkhead views, and hit to that corresponding bulkhead risk damging said barbette. This is probably a good way to help player visualize the extent of the area that are at risk and protection.

Rather than mandatory citadel size scaling with turret/machinery, we could have options of narrow/normal citadel protection. So the player can decide whether they wants to spend the extra weight to give those out of citadel turret additional protection, or cut back and bit and take the risk with BE. As for funnel, I think the current system is fine since it is unlikely that you get to place funnels in a way that actually puts them closer to either end of the ship than turrets anyways. (Although that maybe a cool way to incorporate all-forward arrangement without special dedicated hull).

A little thought to add to AoN. It doesn't need to necessarily eliminate flotation damage nor does it needs to restrict BE/DE. What it should do is reduce the relative weight of non-citadel bulkheads has on flotation and possibly structure. AoN ships should not sink without damage to its citadel space. BE/DE can still be used for a bit of protection against small caliber if you dont want to take on some minor flooding that may slow you down etc.. but lose some of the weight saving you could've recieved. (for example, 8" hit outside of citidel on South Dakota was able to cause some flooding and minor damage, not threatening to the ship, but can be troublesome.)

And armored scheme choices like, Sloped Deck v. Flat Deck should have a bit of influence on how the actual armor value of the ships are calculated, weight, and some possible effect on comparmentlization. Whether AON is applied can be separte from this (To my understanding most if not all AON ship had flat deck, but I am not sure if this necessarily had to be the case)

[Cptbarney]

Well what we have is fine, just have it so that if you place things in weird areas you get penalties. like shoving turrets on the very ends or something.

Otherwise you start to restrict design work too much and then forced to go for a lot of meta and samey samey builds over and over (defeats the purpose of the game).

I understand though and it is a good idea for historical modes. I think the ability to customise where most of the armour will go and how your armour scheme will look would be better so, you can have the entire side 300mm's or some 400mm strips instead and citadel could be split into two or seperate sections or one massive block if peeps wanted unusual designs etc.

Still a good idea for historical modes doe.

Edited November 5, 2019 by Cptbarney

[Diabolic_Wave]

I'm very much in favour of it in general terms. Having an internal armour scheme that works, to restrict the gun position, etc, would be superb. And limited non-citadel flooding for All or Nothing sounds fun too. It'd also discourage some weird as hell tactics, like going bow on, which tended to increase hit percentages slightly in real life.
Bonus points for an 'armour scheme viewer' that lets you see the citadel without all the stuff above it, so you can see, say, why the back has so much more armour in it.

I feel that essentially a 'sliding scale' from 'armoured deck' to 'well designed citadel' would be extremely fun to tinker with and look at, encouraging different play styles, both using it and against.
With just an armoured deck, low calibre secondaries would come into their own, being able to cripple protected cruisers relatively easily. With a tapering armour scheme, more medium calibre guns might be needed, to blow through the ship's heavier armour. Meanwhile, with All or nothing and other more advanced armour schemes, you have to pound the ship to kingdom come with heavy guns, taking ages to sink, even after the ship is crippled.

I'm certainly dramatising it, but it sounds fun to me.

[Illya von Einzbern]

hmm won't this limit the possibilities to make wonky ship designs?
I mean if the citadel extends with all the guns? I do understand that with main battery this makes sens but with secondaries and casements this would be slightly worrisome. 

[captinjoehenry]

Honestly I like this idea.  But I would want an option to have main battery guns outside of the citadel and then chose just to up armor their magazine.  That would of course increase the amount of weight you need to carry in citadel armor but I can't think of a reason you'd need a full citadel underneath all guns considering you just need a tunnel to bring them power and then armor on the turrets internals.  You should just need the full sized citadel around the machinery.

[RAMJB]

7 hours ago, captinjoehenry said:

Honestly I like this idea.  But I would want an option to have main battery guns outside of the citadel and then chose just to up armor their magazine.  That would of course increase the amount of weight you need to carry in citadel armor but I can't think of a reason you'd need a full citadel underneath all guns considering you just need a tunnel to bring them power and then armor on the turrets internals.  You should just need the full sized citadel around the machinery.

Uhm. What was considered as the "armored citadel" was the armored area that covered critical spaces within the hull. Those were magazines, of course. But also were engineering spaces, and more importantly, machinery. A shell in the machinery areas could be as crippling as a shell on a barbette or magazine space. It didn't cause the fireworks a magazine going off did, but a shell on the machinery areas could very well leave a ship dead on the water...which means alive, but just waiting to die.

So the machinery had the same priority to be protected as the magazines, And the machinery was generally placed amidships, in separate boiler rooms, turbine rooms, etc. General layout differed a lot from design to design (much of the final machinery layout also depende on how many turrets and magazines the design had, for instance), but the placement usually didn't - amidship in the middle area that went from the fore turrets to the aft turrets.

That's why you needed continuous protection from the fore turrets right down to the aft ones.

[ThatZenoGuy]

A hit to the machinery can also result in a boiler explosion, which is probably also not good.

[captinjoehenry]

9 hours ago, RAMJB said:

Uhm. What was considered as the "armored citadel" was the armored area that covered critical spaces within the hull. Those were magazines, of course. But also were engineering spaces, and more importantly, machinery. A shell in the machinery areas could be as crippling as a shell on a barbette or magazine space. It didn't cause the fireworks a magazine going off did, but a shell on the machinery areas could very well leave a ship dead on the water...which means alive, but just waiting to die.

So the machinery had the same priority to be protected as the magazines, And the machinery was generally placed amidships, in separate boiler rooms, turbine rooms, etc. General layout differed a lot from design to design (much of the final machinery layout also depende on how many turrets and magazines the design had, for instance), but the placement usually didn't - amidship in the middle area that went from the fore turrets to the aft turrets.

That's why you needed continuous protection from the fore turrets right down to the aft ones.

I was more referring to situations where you might want to place the turrets towards the ends of the hull.  So instead of having a continuous citadel running most of the length of the ship you would have one around the machinery and then seperate ones around each turret.  So you can save some amount of weight in cases where turrets are placed far from the center of the ship

[Microscop]

On 12/3/2019 at 4:08 PM, captinjoehenry said:

I was more referring to situations where you might want to place the turrets towards the ends of the hull.  So instead of having a continuous citadel running most of the length of the ship you would have one around the machinery and then seperate ones around each turret.  So you can save some amount of weight in cases where turrets are placed far from the center of the ship

But this means you need 6 transverse bulkheads instead of 2 which makes the potential weight saving from having the split citadel dubious. Also it means everything inbetween is unprotected including some fairly important components.

[captinjoehenry]

1 hour ago, Microscop said:

But this means you need 6 transverse bulkheads instead of 2 which makes the potential weight saving from having the split citadel dubious. Also it means everything inbetween is unprotected including some fairly important components.

Fair enough.  But at least being able to narrow the citedal or something would be nice.  As with the max tonage BB hull we already have there's a lot of unused deck space.  Like a citadel like this would save a lot of weight VS going all the way to the hull edge 

[RAMJB]

Problem with that drawing is that you give as a granted that you can armor the lines you've plotted.
 

You cannot. Boiler and engine rooms are pretty massive. Magazines also tend to be (16'' shells aren't tiny and you're packing an average of 300 shells per magazine room in the ship that pic belongs to. Plus propellant bags).

You also don't put heavy armor directly next to your critical rooms. That's just asking for torpedoes to make a number on you. What you do is to set the room to protect, give as much space and room as possible, then lay the antitorpedo bulkhead, then lay the Torpedo Defense System itself right out to the exterior hull. Immediately avobe the TDS, you put your main armored belt. That means that in most cases that belt *must* be exterior. Of course you can put an interior belt (and maybe use a decapping plate as your external hull putting some water absorbing material in the middle a-la Littorio), but the main belt still will be pretty much next to the external hull. And that may not be as good as an idea as you might think initially for reasons we'll see later.

In fact the armoring of warships got a lot more complicated as torpedoes grew to be a much bigger threat. See, the deeper a TDS is, and the more layers it has, the much more effective it is. Yet you can easily see that a hull is not a rectangle, the extremes of the ship have a lot less beam, meaning that given that the critical rooms you're trying to protect are pretty large, there's a lot less space for a TDS than amidships. Meaning, torpedo impacts directly under the foremost and aftmost turrets tended to do a lot more damage than the ones impacting directly on the beam (it wasn't a rare ocurrence to have to flood magazines in such torpedo hits to prevent risk of detonations).


Anyway, the point is that you can't "contour" armor plates in the way you did in that drawing. First, because it's not going to offer proper protection. Second because that shape is contoured (meaning, it's not straight, and plate armor is SIGNIFICANTLY easier to manufacture in straight plates rather than in bent shapes. In fact for the thicknesses involved in main belts I'm not sure bending plates to accomodate for shapes was possible at all).

And finally because that armor is integrally internal. Not unprecedented (well, yes in the placement, no ship had a belt that deep inside the hull, belts were pretty much put at the extremes of the beam even in internal belt ships), but also problematic. See, belt plates tend to get beaten up in battle - are in fact designed to do so. Penetrations obviously require a complete replacement of the perforated plate. But even glancing blows and near misses can have a seriously disruptive effect on the belt; displacing it, maybe shearing some welds or bolts causing it to leak, etc. It's easy to understand that with an external belt, whatever repairs you need to do is straightforward: repair the plate or replace it. Presto, you're done.

With an internal one is not so easy. First you need to cut out the external shell (in most cases thin plate on it's own) to access the internal belt. Then you need to repair/replace it. Then you have to get going again to get the external cladding in place (and decapping plate if there's one, and whatever material you put in the middle if you bothered with it in the design). It was a much more work intensive process (not to mention, more expensive) and a pain in the butt to get done. To the point that the navy that made the most use out of the internal belt concept (US Navy) just plain rejected to repeat the idea in their final, apex, design, the Montana, which was going to have an inclined, but external, belt because of the constant headache it was to conduct maintenaince on the internal belts of the South Dakotas and Iowas.


So bassically what you're proposing simply couldn't be done anyway for very real practical reasons. When you think of a battleship citadel think it of a box. it's as long as it must be to cover from the forwardmost magazine to the rearmost one, while also covering for machinery and engineering spaces. It's as high as it must be to fully encapsulate those spaces aswell**. And it's, generally, as wide as the hull is, and in the exceptions is ALMOST as wide.


** you could of course put your armored decks lower leaving critical components avobe. The Scharnhorsts did it, the design underestimated the space needed for the machinery and when the time came to put it on there was a "hump" of machinery avobe the main armored deck. They made do with giving it a thinly armored "box" on it's own to cover for it. 
Of course then comes Duke of York and places a 14'' shell straight down that point, cripples the machinery, slows down Scharnhorst, and the rest is history. Those kind of compromises tend to never end well, the Gods of War really tend to love Murphy's Law, after all...

[captinjoehenry]

15 minutes ago, RAMJB said:

Problem with that drawing is that you give as a granted that you can armor the lines you've plotted.
 

You cannot. Boiler and engine rooms are pretty massive. Magazines also tend to be (16'' shells aren't tiny and you're packing an average of 300 shells per magazine room in the ship that pic belongs to. Plus propellant bags).

You also don't put heavy armor directly next to your critical rooms. That's just asking for torpedoes to make a number on you. What you do is to set the room to protect, give as much space and room as possible, then lay the antitorpedo bulkhead, then lay the Torpedo Defense System itself right out to the exterior hull. Immediately avobe the TDS, you put your main armored belt. That means that in most cases that belt *must* be exterior. Of course you can put an interior belt (and maybe use a decapping plate as your external hull putting some water absorbing material in the middle a-la Littorio), but the main belt still will be pretty much next to the external hull. And that may not be as good as an idea as you might think initially for reasons we'll see later.

In fact the armoring of warships got a lot more complicated as torpedoes grew to be a much bigger threat. See, the deeper a TDS is, and the more layers it has, the much more effective it is. Yet you can easily see that a hull is not a rectangle, the extremes of the ship have a lot less beam, meaning that given that the critical rooms you're trying to protect are pretty large, there's a lot less space for a TDS than amidships. Meaning, torpedo impacts directly under the foremost and aftmost turrets tended to do a lot more damage than the ones impacting directly on the beam (it wasn't a rare ocurrence to have to flood magazines in such torpedo hits to prevent risk of detonations).


Anyway, the point is that you can't "contour" armor plates in the way you did in that drawing. First, because it's not going to offer proper protection. Second because that shape is contoured (meaning, it's not straight, and plate armor is SIGNIFICANTLY easier to manufacture in straight plates rather than in bent shapes. In fact for the thicknesses involved in main belts I'm not sure bending plates to accomodate for shapes was possible at all).

And finally because that armor is integrally internal. Not unprecedented (well, yes in the placement, no ship had a belt that deep inside the hull, belts were pretty much put at the extremes of the beam even in internal belt ships), but also problematic. See, belt plates tend to get beaten up in battle - are in fact designed to do so. Penetrations obviously require a complete replacement of the perforated plate. But even glancing blows and near misses can have a seriously disruptive effect on the belt; displacing it, maybe shearing some welds or bolts causing it to leak, etc. It's easy to understand that with an external belt, whatever repairs you need to do is straightforward: repair the plate or replace it. Presto, you're done.

With an internal one is not so easy. First you need to cut out the external shell (in most cases thin plate on it's own) to access the internal belt. Then you need to repair/replace it. Then you have to get going again to get the external cladding in place (and decapping plate if there's one, and whatever material you put in the middle if you bothered with it in the design). It was a much more work intensive process (not to mention, more expensive) and a pain in the butt to get done. To the point that the navy that made the most use out of the internal belt concept (US Navy) just plain rejected to repeat the idea in their final, apex, design, the Montana, which was going to have an inclined, but external, belt because of the constant headache it was to conduct maintenaince on the internal belts of the South Dakotas and Iowas.


So bassically what you're proposing simply couldn't be done anyway for very real practical reasons. When you think of a battleship citadel think it of a box. it's as long as it must be to cover from the forwardmost magazine to the rearmost one, while also covering for machinery and engineering spaces. It's as high as it must be to fully encapsulate those spaces aswell**. And it's, generally, as wide as the hull is, and in the exceptions is ALMOST as wide.


** you could of course put your armored decks lower leaving critical components avobe. The Scharnhorsts did it, the design underestimated the space needed for the machinery and when the time came to put it on there was a "hump" of machinery avobe the main armored deck. They made do with giving it a thinly armored "box" on it's own to cover for it. 
Of course then comes Duke of York and places a 14'' shell straight down that point, cripples the machinery, slows down Scharnhorst, and the rest is history. Those kind of compromises tend to never end well, the Gods of War really tend to love Murphy's Law, after all...

Ah!  Thank you for this detailed reply!  It makes a lot of sense!

I was mostly just thinking that the turret infrastructure is notably smaller than the machinery such as the boilers and such.  Or at least narrower. 

I know full well the designed I showed up above is unrealistic but I find it a lot of fun to play around with designs like it and was just thinking that there's bound to be some way to save weight on the citadel armor considering how huge the area that needs protecting is and how much empty space would be left if you used the normal full beam citadel along 80% of the length of the ship.

I know cruiser design isn't like BB design but I figured you might be able to do something like this: 

Where the entire machinery area is raised up while the area for the ammo magazines are sunken down due to them being so much shorter than the machinery.  Which also helps put the magazines deeper beneath the water line and harder to hit.  

Mind you cruisers are so different from BBs I have no idea if this is actually a functional choice for BBs

So like what they did with the Scharnhorsts but for the whole machinery space instead of just a hump

Edited December 7, 2019 by captinjoehenry

[RAMJB]

Cruisers tended to be slightly different animals. In battleships the main armored deck tended to be "flush", meaning, same level across the citadel area. Doesn't mean there weren't exceptions, though, but the general rule was that. Also keep in mind that in battleships barbette armor was present for all turrets - not only for the portion avobe the deck on the superfiring turrets. Armor on the barbette had to be significant avobe the level of the belt protected area, once it went under it could be much more lightly armored. So there's also a practical reason to keep the main armored deck higher even if the magazine areas don't strictly need it.

Also, that picture is nothing like what they did with the Scharnhorst. What they did with the scharnhorst was an "oopsie, that part of the machinery is higher than the armored deck level...ok, let's plate it over with some thin armor and we'll call it a day" ;).

For instance:
 

Edited December 7, 2019 by RAMJB

[captinjoehenry]

7 minutes ago, RAMJB said:

Cruisers tended to be slightly different animals. In battleships the main armored deck tended to be "flush", meaning, same level across the citadel area. Doesn't mean there weren't exceptions, though, but the general rule was that. Also keep in mind that in battleships barbette armor was present for all turrets - not only for the portion avobe the deck on the superfiring turrets. Armor on the barbette had to be significant avobe the level of the belt protected area, once it went under it could be much more lightly armored. So there's also a practical reason to keep the main armored deck higher even if the magazine areas don't strictly need it.

For instance:
 

Interesting! 

I'm not sure though if a level deck would still be idea with the 105k ton design we have in game though.  Mostly just due to the sheer amount of deck space available and the smallness of the tower we have in game.  Makes me think you could save a lot of weight by lowering the main belt, with slanting up to the machinery space, and extending the barbette downwards considering how much unneeded citadel space would exist if the citadel wasn't lowered.

Also I just did some really crude math. And it turns out as a guess the BB design I made in game has a citadel about 70%~ of it's hull length.  Which is actually an identical % as the BB design that you posted.  The Montana design that I found is about 58% hull length in citadel and the Yamato is about 53%.  Which makes me think my design, while large, isn't entirely out of line with reality.

[RAMJB]

Level decks were the norm. Between many other reasons because, remember, advanced AoN included the concept of "lifeboat raft citadel". You had to guarantee enough reserve buoyancy behind enclosed protected citadel armor to keep the ship afloat even if every other room out of the citadel was flooded. Obviously that means protecting critical volume was also a consideration in AoN design, not just critical equipment. And if you step down the main deck to a lower (probably under-waterline) level on the citadel's extremes, that's volume you're not protecting to keep you afloat.
 

As for the rest - your citadel as drawn in red lines is ok lenghtwise ;).

It's not beam wise. The areas you marked with the red lines are not the ones you'd armor. You'd need a far wider "box" to cover the key citadel rooms you wanted to protect, while leaving enough space for the intermediary protective structures you'd need to protect them aswell (such as torpedo defense systems, antitorpedo bulkheads, etc). Not to mention again the need for critical volume to give the citadel the buoyancy it needs to fullfit the liferaft concept. The red lines you drew should be much closer to the external sides...if not on the sides themselves.

As for relative lenghts, the design you posted has extremely spaced out weaponry. Designs of the time tried to punch it all in as much a tightly packed space as possible, your design does not do it. Part of it is obviously the limitations we have with the designer (particularily so because of barbette placement) that pretty much force us to put weapons in given places, not where we'd want them, but it still is what it is. Once the designer is a lot more dynamic (and it should be at some point, right now is too inflexible), you'll probably be able to pack features much tightly than right now.


As for the vast deck spaces on ships that size - it's what it was. Yamato was known for having huge tracts of empty spaces on her deck. Which she couldn't really make a lot of use for because of the mammoth muzzle blast of those guns would wipe away any equipment on that deck. American ships also had huge chunks of free deck available, though they tended to cram it with a lot of AA guns wherever they could that wouldn't get blown overboard by her own main guns firing.

vast deck spaces would've been the common thing once ships went to the large tonnages seen by the end of WW2. It's a particular demand of their design requirements for fast speeds. For a ship to be fast you need to make it hydrodynamically efficient in order to keep machinery power outputs reasonable - that means a large L/B ratio, it also means very long ships (longer ships are naturally less draggy at high speeds that shorter ships). Given that you'd be at the same time packing all the critical stuff in the least volume as possible, because you still want to keep armor protection as thick as possible, the result would be ships with huge decks of...pretty much nothingness. Again, it was just the way things were going to look like had the plane not made the battleship a white elephant, so nothing surprising there ;).

Edited December 7, 2019 by RAMJB

[captinjoehenry]

2 minutes ago, RAMJB said:

Level decks were the norm. Between many other reasons because, remember, advanced AoN included the concept of "lifeboat raft citadel". You had to guarantee enough reserve buoyancy behind enclosed protected citadel armor to keep the ship afloat even if every other room out of the citadel was flooded. Obviously that means protecting critical volume was also a consideration in AoN design, not just critical equipment. And if you step down the main deck to a lower (probably under-waterline) level on the citadel's extremes, that's volume you're not protecting to keep you afloat.
 

As for the rest - your citadel as drawn in red lines is ok lenghtwise ;).

It's not beam wise. The areas you marked with the red lines are not the ones you'd armor. You'd need a far wider "box" to cover the key citadel rooms you wanted to protect, while leaving enough space for the intermediary protective structures you'd need to protect them aswell (such as torpedo defense systems, antitorpedo bulkheads, etc). Not to mention again the need for critical volume to give the citadel the buoyancy it needs to fullfit the liferaft concept. The red lines you drew should be much closer to the external sides...if not on the sides themselves.

As for relative lenghts, the design you posted has extremely spaced out weaponry. Designs of the time tried to punch it all in as much a tightly packed space as possible, your design does not do it. Part of it is obviously the limitations we have with the designer (particularily so because of barbette placement) that pretty much force us to put weapons in given places, not where we'd want them, but it still is what it is. Once the designer is a lot more dynamic (and it should be at some point, right now is too inflexible), you'll probably be able to pack features much tightly than right now.


As for the vast deck spaces on ships that size - it's what it was. Yamato was known for having huge tracts of empty spaces on her deck. Which she couldn't really make a lot of use for because of the mammoth muzzle blast of those guns would wipe away any equipment on that deck. American ships also had huge chunks of free deck available, though they tended to cram it with a lot of AA guns wherever they could that wouldn't get blown overboard by her own main guns firing.

vast deck spaces would've been the common thing once ships went to the large tonnages seen by the end of WW2. It's a particular demand of their design requirements for fast speeds. For a ship to be fast you need to make it hydrodynamically efficient in order to keep machinery power outputs reasonable - that means a large L/B ratio, it also means very long ships (longer ships are naturally less draggy at high speeds that shorter ships). Given that you'd be at the same time packing all the critical stuff in the least volume as possible, because you still want to keep armor protection as thick as possible, the result would be ships with huge decks of...pretty much nothingness. Again, it was just the way things were going to look like had the plane not made the battleship a white elephant, so nothing surprising there ;).

Ah neat!  

Honestly though the reason I placed the turrets where I have has more to do with their firing angles and allowing them to rotate 360 degrees.  As while I know it isn't realistic I have found that angling armor in game works rather well.  It has allowed me more than a few times to take lightly armored BBs into close range of really large guns by keeping the hull angled.  And having good firing arcs really helps that.  So I actually end up sacrificing main belt armor to up armor my turrets as with angling I can get away with a decent amount less main belt.

[RAMJB]

Good firing arcs are a benefit for any battleship design. Specially in a game that doesn't replicate the many complications self-harming muzzle blasts had when firing at those extreme angles (lots of cases of this, best one would be the Nelson class being a danger to herself if she dared to fire her guns at too extreme bearings) ;). So I can see the rationale of spacing out guns a bit to afford some extra degrees of traverse. But you can achieve that with a much more tightly packed Turrets-superstructure group. Or, well, hopefully you will be able to once structure placement in ship is either not dependant on attachment points, or far more flexible in it's implementation.


The whole idea of "rotating 360 degrees" honestly... ok, I know it comes from WOWS. It actually is really useful there given the short ranges involved and the many made up mechanics that form the core of an arcade game. In reality it really was not such a big deal. In fact it pretty much wasn't even a consideration. In warships, even big ones (might seem conterintuitive, but it's really not), space is usually at a premium. By spacing out turrets in search for the 360º rotation you're eating out space that would be used for other things as living quarters, fuel bunkerage, etc. You also force an extension of your protective scheme with all the displacement cost attached. And in battle, truly, is going to make a very marginal difference.

The whole angled thing...yes, angling works. To a point. In reality if you took that to an extreme it also would've helped the enemy more than it helped you - I wrote a piece of it in the "multiplayer or bust" thread if you want to take a look as for why. Keep in mind that this game's purpose is to replicate real naval combat (and real strategic fleet command decisions when the campaign is out). There are some things not yet in there - but that there will be, and will make the "angling" idea a highly questionable one. Or at least here's hoping they will be. Right now it's already questionable enough, given the statistical nature of the gunnery model, you're cutting your chances to hit the enemy by a significant margin if you mask some of your turrets. Of course here's where your good angles help - that's nice, but don't overdo it because as in almost every instance of mechanic that works in real life, there are deminishing returns to everything that's taken to an extreme, up to the point that something that in moderate ammount would help you if taken to too steep of an extreme they'll actually harm you.

So, some angling is always ok. I mean, having a somewhat reasonable nose in or nose out attitude towards the enemy will help your ability to bounce shells that otherwise wouldn't - the effect of angled armor plates increasing effective protection is something very real and taking advantage of it won't hurt your chances. But other things like overmatching (as generally understood from WOT and WOWS) are, even founded on a real effect, pretty much made up for balancing reasons in those games, and do not work as you'd expect in this game. Which might come in as a big "oopsie" sooner or later (right now there are no stakes in battles, but in a campaign when in the middle of an ongoing war, your super expensive BB is riddled to the top with holes because the enemy had an easy time figuring out the target solution, those stakes will be very real ;))

[captinjoehenry]

10 hours ago, RAMJB said:

Good firing arcs are a benefit for any battleship design. Specially in a game that doesn't replicate the many complications self-harming muzzle blasts had when firing at those extreme angles (lots of cases of this, best one would be the Nelson class being a danger to herself if she dared to fire her guns at too extreme bearings) ;). So I can see the rationale of spacing out guns a bit to afford some extra degrees of traverse. But you can achieve that with a much more tightly packed Turrets-superstructure group. Or, well, hopefully you will be able to once structure placement in ship is either not dependant on attachment points, or far more flexible in it's implementation.


The whole idea of "rotating 360 degrees" honestly... ok, I know it comes from WOWS. It actually is really useful there given the short ranges involved and the many made up mechanics that form the core of an arcade game. In reality it really was not such a big deal. In fact it pretty much wasn't even a consideration. In warships, even big ones (might seem conterintuitive, but it's really not), space is usually at a premium. By spacing out turrets in search for the 360º rotation you're eating out space that would be used for other things as living quarters, fuel bunkerage, etc. You also force an extension of your protective scheme with all the displacement cost attached. And in battle, truly, is going to make a very marginal difference.

The whole angled thing...yes, angling works. To a point. In reality if you took that to an extreme it also would've helped the enemy more than it helped you - I wrote a piece of it in the "multiplayer or bust" thread if you want to take a look as for why. Keep in mind that this game's purpose is to replicate real naval combat (and real strategic fleet command decisions when the campaign is out). There are some things not yet in there - but that there will be, and will make the "angling" idea a highly questionable one. Or at least here's hoping they will be. Right now it's already questionable enough, given the statistical nature of the gunnery model, you're cutting your chances to hit the enemy by a significant margin if you mask some of your turrets. Of course here's where your good angles help - that's nice, but don't overdo it because as in almost every instance of mechanic that works in real life, there are deminishing returns to everything that's taken to an extreme, up to the point that something that in moderate ammount would help you if taken to too steep of an extreme they'll actually harm you.

So, some angling is always ok. I mean, having a somewhat reasonable nose in or nose out attitude towards the enemy will help your ability to bounce shells that otherwise wouldn't - the effect of angled armor plates increasing effective protection is something very real and taking advantage of it won't hurt your chances. But other things like overmatching (as generally understood from WOT and WOWS) are, even founded on a real effect, pretty much made up for balancing reasons in those games, and do not work as you'd expect in this game. Which might come in as a big "oopsie" sooner or later (right now there are no stakes in battles, but in a campaign when in the middle of an ongoing war, your super expensive BB is riddled to the top with holes because the enemy had an easy time figuring out the target solution, those stakes will be very real ;))

Yeah I get that.  I still give as much belt armor as I can and then stack a buttload of extended belt as well.  At least 7.5 inches and usually more to help minimize any pens from the front.

So yeah I'm well aware of not over doing it.  And as for the 360 turrets that more has to do with how much I personally like that design   Plus when looking for the more extreme arcs for heavy angling you end being able to rotate 360 anyways.  And at least in this game it doesn't add too too much space. 

Mind you you're quite right that it's not really useful most of the time.