we really need Transverse Bulkheads modelled (AKA: no more unrealistic bow-tanking pls!)

[disc]

5 hours ago, RAMJB said:

I can see how you would label that as a "turtleback", however.

Yeah, I think most people are more familiar with the German style. I think that approach was possible only with the acceptance of limited protected volume. The French and Americans sort of sidestepped this by having the heavy armor a full deck above their turtlebacks.

The whole of the German armoring idea strikes me as ... fanciful. If Plan Z were to come to fruition, would not a battlefleet that could fight at long range be preferable? Else one might stick to destroyers and cruisers, which fight at shorter ranges just fine with rapid-fire guns and torpedoes.

 

5 hours ago, captinjoehenry said:

Do any of our current armor lay out options include an inclined belt?

no...sort of. This is partially abstracted as the inherent "resistance" on the hulls, per one of the developer posts. Not a strictly realistic approach, but, as has been well-said, the designs are simplified. My thought is that the armor models are not 3D anyway. I am very curious to see how (if?) this will change.

 

[RAMJB]

5 hours ago, disc said:

Yeah, I think most people are more familiar with the German style. I think that approach was possible only with the acceptance of limited protected volume. The French and Americans sort of sidestepped this by having the heavy armor a full deck above their turtlebacks.

The whole of the German armoring idea strikes me as ... fanciful. If Plan Z were to come to fruition, would not a battlefleet that could fight at long range be preferable? Else one might stick to destroyers and cruisers, which fight at shorter ranges just fine with rapid-fire guns and torpedoes.

 

Yes, putting an armored deck with the shallow angle required to really give meaningful extra protection against side penetrations without an inordinate ammount of thickness comes with the tradeoff that you can't put that main armored deck anywhere higher (unless you seriously compromise on thicknesses and weight, and Bismarck for instance was big enough already to add yet another armored deck AVOBE the turtleback one). So, a bigger volume is left unprotected (or covered by mid-thicknesses of the upper belt, decent do deal against small and medium calibers but paper for heavy projectiles).

Bismarck being silenced in little more than 20 minutes was a direct result of that tradeoff and armor layout. After those 20 minutes she was reduced to silence, and the british could just park next door and blast it to oblivion with an ungodly ammount of shells.

 Which raises the question about what is an armor layout good for, if it makes your ship exceptionally hard to sink, but relatively easy to soft kill. Personally the whole concept is flawed. But when you make calculations and understand that even Yamato's guns would have a really hard time at penetrating that protective scheme at short ranges, it kinda looks impressive.

as for the Plan Z... to begin with I don't think it was plausible. That much ship construction on such a short timespan, on a nation that also was making a tremendous effort to grow it's army and air force as Germany was....resources are finite, you just can do so much with them, even in a totalitarian regime. Germany just didn't have the resources to multiplicate it's panzer divisions AND create a powerful air force AND build the Plan-Z ships. It's a material impossibility.

Plan Z was a pipedream that was out of reach for Germany to complete, as far as I'm concerned. Also that plan wasn't created to give germany a battlefleet, but a cadre of incredibly expensive surface raiders where cost effectiveness was not a consideration. The H-39s were given diesel powerplants not because they were intended to fight a fleet action against the british, but because of their need for enormous range for raiding sorties. That the warship as a surface raider concept itself was obsolete by the 1930s seems to have weighed nothing at all in those pleans - and neither did that for killing merchants 16'' and 15'' guns are absurd.

For all practical purposes (And that was seen during WW2) it was a far better investment to dress up some merchant ships as raiders and let them loose than spend ungodly ammount of resources and money on massive ships doomed to always fight in inferiority, and on which as multiple instances show (such as AGS or Bismarck), a single unlucky hit can doom the sortie and probably the ship aswell. And all you could show up for the loss of a massively expensive ship would be, in the best case scenario, a handful of captured or sunk merchants several times cheaper than the lost ships themselves. So, the whole thing (plan Z) was a sham. It wasn't either possible to fullfit it, and it was intended for a doctrine doomed to fail.

Edited December 13, 2019 by RAMJB

[khang36]

On 12/11/2019 at 7:59 PM, RedParadize said:

Is that confirmed? Where did you got that from?

I would welcome a armour overhaul. The ability to go for the "all or nothing" armor scheme would be nice. What would be even better we had to care about layout inside the hull. Like engine and ammo box placement. All of it would restrain where you can place stuff on deck and influence how long the main belt is. That way making a Nelson would be something.

I do not recall where but i remember one of the devs saying that the current citadel options are just a placeholder untill they implement proper amour schemes.