Ammo Detonation on BBs deal minimal / no damage

[captinjoehenry]

When firing at enemy BBs with 18" super heavy AP I've seen a few ammo detonations on the enemy ships.  In the previous patch that would mean massive amounts of damage.  In this patch though it deals seemingly no extra damage:

As you can see the Ammo Detonation dealt a whopping 72 damage.  While other pens had dealt 73, 104 and 189 damage.

I should think suffering an internal ammo detonation would cause massive damage instead of below average damage for a single shell.

[Nick Thomadis]

You may notice not very high ammo detonation damage in heavy ships that are well protected.
Ammo detonation can happen for all types of ammunition and can cause damage in a different manner, depending on the ship's internals' protection system and the ammo storage that is detonated.

A shot that penetrates deeply inside a lightly armored ship and causing detonation to heavy caliber ammo, can cause catastrophic damage and most probably an instant sink.

A shot that penetrates but fails to penetrate fully the internal barbettes, may cause limited damage.

A shot that penetrates but detonates ammo storage of small shells (secondary guns) can cause limited damage. 

 

[Nick Thomadis]

*Follow up*
Detonation mechanics are not finalized. Later they will include flash fires that can burn out the turret and inflict personnel casualties (if they are not trained enough to close doors quickly and flood the magazine), or can be very deadly and spread to other turrets and the main magazine storage.

 

[captinjoehenry]

Alright.  Only thought it was a bug as previous patch every single ammo detonation that I saw did massive damage.  While this patch I've seen a fair few of standard damage pens that just so happen to have also been ammo detonations which seemed odd

[akd]

Some more questions on ammo detonations:

1. Can they only occur following penetration, e.g. can a torpedo launcher be hit directly and cause an ammo detonation?  I’ve seen torpedo launchers knocked out many, many times, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this directly associated with an ammo detonation.  This should be a huge risk of covering ships in large numbers of external torpedoes.

2. I think I’ve seen a number of capital ships (BBs, CAs) succumb to catastrophic ammo detonations from penetrations that should be outside of the protected citadel (belt / deck extensions), even directly from the side (where the only chance of magazine penetration would be from secondary shrapnel that should be stopped by transverse armor protection or a protected deck.  Does the chance of ammo detonation associated with penetration not care where the penetration occurs?  (That said, with the new protection diagram shown on targets, I see that the AI quite frequently builds ships with main turrets outside of the citadel.)

[Steeltrap]

On 12/14/2019 at 6:56 AM, akd said:

Some more questions on ammo detonations:

1. Can they only occur following penetration, e.g. can a torpedo launcher be hit directly and cause an ammo detonation?  I’ve seen torpedo launchers knocked out many, many times, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this directly associated with an ammo detonation.  This should be a huge risk of covering ships in large numbers of external torpedoes.

2. I think I’ve seen a number of capital ships (BBs, CAs) succumb to catastrophic ammo detonations from penetrations that should be outside of the protected citadel (belt / deck extensions), even directly from the side (where the only chance of magazine penetration would be from secondary shrapnel that should be stopped by transverse armor protection or a protected deck.  Does the chance of ammo detonation associated with penetration not care where the penetration occurs?  (That said, with the new protection diagram shown on targets, I see that the AI quite frequently builds ships with main turrets outside of the citadel.)

1. I've never seen ammo detonation of torpedo reloads despite penetrations destroying the submerged launcher.

2. As you said, the problem is a mismatch between the armour zones and the placement of the magazines. As it stands magazines can effectively be located behind 'extended' belt and deck whereas they really ought not be. You probably saw the general discussion topic where various armour pictures were presented: 

That shows the issue pretty well.

[Steeltrap]

I raised this as an issue and was told it's not implemented yet which is fair enough.

Would like to raise it as a reminder, however.

Ammo explosions DO NOT alter available ammunition counter. Even with the highly simplified magazine system in place, it would be nice if they did reduce a certain % of available shells.

Cheers

[RAMJB]

9 minutes ago, Steeltrap said:

As it stands magazines can effectively be located behind 'extended' belt and deck whereas they really ought not be.

I know is not game related but..."ought not to be" is one thing..."never was" is a different one. Japanese turret farms (Fusos and Ises, specially the former) had far thinner protection alongside their extreme turrets than the middle ones did, as their main belt tapered towards the ends of their coverage area (they were covered by the equivalent of less than 200mm of armor, a far cry from the 300mm of nominal belt armor they supposedly had).

One could qualify that as "being behind an extended belt" ;). At any rate, sorry for the little offtopic, but, well, that magazines were supposed to be given very good protection doesn't mean they always did - and in game whatever the final version of the final armor layout mechanic is, care should be taken to give them proper armor too :).

Edited January 13, 2020 by RAMJB

[Steeltrap]

10 minutes ago, RAMJB said:

I know is not game related but..."ought not to be" is one thing..."never was" is a different one. Japanese turret farms (Fusos and Ises, specially the former) had far thinner protection alongside their extreme turrets than the middle ones did, as their main belt tapered towards the ends of their coverage area (they were covered by the equivalent of less than 200mm of armor.

One could qualify that as "being behind an extended belt" ;). At any rate, sorry for the little offtopic, but, well, that magazines were supposed to be given very good protection doesn't mean they always did - and in game whatever the final version of the final armor layout mechanic is, care should be taken to give them proper armor too :).

I didn't say never was, lol, and I know you didn't say I did, but yes I'm aware sometimes different choices were made. Fusos decided moar guns > armour, the wisdom of which probably wasn't really tested. As you know, HMS Nelson was designed with entirely the opposite in mind, having the smallest area to armour while retaining the firepower. Both, as always, involved compromises.

Regardless, we're talking general armour scheme design principles.

In the case of a 'turret farm design' I would expect them to address that either through forcing you to have less armour generally because the area to be armoured would be so much larger that the weight would be prohibitive.

The alternative would be to allow more specific armouring, but I don't know that they want to bother with that level of complexity and I don't blame them.

Cheers

Edited January 13, 2020 by Steeltrap