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[RAMJB]

3 hours ago, Maty83 said:

The radar getting knocked out and North Cape was a crucial part of the battle though, because afterwards Scharnhorst couldn't see the trap laid out for her.

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.

Edited January 8, 2020 by RAMJB

[DougToss]

Perhaps it would help people to know what the advances in fire control were in the time period and what they meant. From that, it would be easier to have a common understanding on how gameplay might be effected by different fire control systems and what should happen if they are absent or disabled. For instance, when did central fire control come about, what did it do, how did that impact gunnery, why was that preferable to local control,  how could it be degraded in battle and what superseded it? 

Ideally, the finished game will include this information in the documentation, an accessible in-game encyclopedia and the UI when designing ships as well as when relevant in battle. That would also apply to propulsion, armament, gunnery and protection.

I think the perceived impenetrability of military simulators to many gamers has always been that military topics are by nature, not common knowledge and  that the UI and documentation of earlier titles - to put it generously - didn't help. That has finally started to change and we have seen interest in wargaming and simulation grow as a result. In short - while the previous generation of naval wargames expected players to have at minimum read Warrior to Dreadnought and Steam, Steel & Shellfire, UI can guide players into making decisions informed by that information without sacrificing realism to make the gameplay fun and accessible to people not well versed (or formally educated - looking at you CMANO!) on the subject. 

I'll give a quick example on the subject of gunnery. I was an artilleryman by trade. I know what shell handling is like, and know how a 105mm (4") projectile at 33lbs is much easier to handle than a 155mm (6") shell at 100lbs. I also know that the 105mm shell was quick firing and fired from a gun with a sliding breach block, while the 155mm shell uses bagged charges and has what is basically a Welin breech block (see, it's already getting complicated).  For hand worked (another complication - what and why mechanical shell handling?) guns those are already pretty major differences in how shell handling works and from that, rate of fire. And that's on dry land! It's unreasonable for the game to expect people to already have that information, but also important for them to use that information when designing and fighting ships. All of that should matter because gunnery in a simulator is a lot more complicated that juggling rate of fire, damage and range to determine some kind of DPS.  The UI is the link that will help players decide that 6" on a destroyer with wet decks is not a good design decision although if they want to, I think they should have the freedom to make that choice with all the realistic pitfalls that entails. 

Edited January 9, 2020 by DougToss

[RAMJB]

2 hours ago, DougToss said:

Perhaps it would help people to know what the advances in fire control were in the time period and what they meant.

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.

Edited January 10, 2020 by RAMJB

[Teckelmaster]

Could several ships work on cooperative solutions? I think i read, that japanese navy used colorcoded splashes to identify individual shots from different ships, so they didnt break up the target solutions of each other, but if one ship happened to be accurate, did it help the others?

And, what happened to be the longest big gun shot, that connected? Is there data available or did it get lost in combat? I imagine, that in the heat of battle, documentation of each shell fired might not have been considered a primary objective. Even though it might have proven usefull for gunnery development.

[Teckelmaster]

And could we not make a sticky thread where we abuse RamJB‘s knowledge and let him share it? I mean, it is so entertaining to read, now i want that „basic“ knowledge i just received about finding solutions in a similar fashion for propulsion, armor, actual gun generations etc. and since it is difficult to scroll through all those threads to find something specific, i request:

Admiral RamJB‘s table for naval warfare thread. 
 

Just saying...

[RAMJB]

No. There was no reliable intercomms between ships back at the day. To the point that orders were issued with flag signals (light signals during nighttime). Wireless was already present in Jutland, but even there it proved to be suffering from teething problems and unreliability - and even by WW2 wireless comms, even while already being very reliable ways of communication, wouldn't be used to keep a couple of fire control officers having a chat about their respective gun solutions. Like, at all.

Several fleets toyed with the idea of color dyes for shells in order to make shell splashes distinctive from long range. The french also used them. One of the side effects of the standard way of aiming guns (spot the fall of shot and correct accordingly) was that if several ships were firing at the same target, it could become really complicated to differentiate which splashes came from whose guns, so you could end up correcting your fire using the fall of shot from someone else's guns - obviously not a very good way to get a proper solution going ;). 

This was a very real issue in real combat, and one that pretty much forced lines of battles to spread their fire on individual enemy ships; the standard firing order was to "fire on your counterpart" meaning each ship in a line would choose the corresponding enemy in the enemy line (1st would target enemy lead ship, 2nd in line, the 2nd in the enemy line, etc). The more numerous side would have the last ships pretty much forced to double down on some enemy someone else was already shooting at, usually starting from the lead. Which was a problem ,but there was little that could be done about.

This of course meant that confusion could happen in battle. And it did in several ocassions, probably the most notable one on Jutland where HMS Tiger completely fuzzed up beatty's order to "shoot on counterpart" and instead of opening up on Seydlitz she ended up firing at Moltke (which already was being engaged by New Zealand), and, confusing New Zealand's splashes by her own's...ended up "correcting" according to the former, which in the end tranlated into HMS Tiger firing salvoes that were landing a whole couple kilometers behind the german line. And she wasn't none the wiser about it for most of that part of the engagement.

Dyes theoretically got rid of that problem - each ship would fire a "color" so each gunnery officer would know which were his ship's shell splashes. There's quite a funny anechdote I read a very long time ago, of a french and british ship going through cooperative gun trials and trainings, I think very early in WW2 (It's been a long time since I read that one, so specific details escape me). Seemingly before shooting started the french captain signaled to the british ship, asking "which color would he shoot". The british captain didn't know what the heck the french guy was talking about, and answered the naval equivalent of a very polite "what the heck are you talking about?". The french ship's answer came quickly, in the shape of a "You'll shoot white, then" ;).

As for how effective that truly was in battle - I have to confess, I have no idea. I don't even know if "shooting colors" was done in actual combat. In theory it should've worked well, but we all know how ideas that look good on paper don't translate well into practical reality for very different and unexpected reasons. Might have worked well, might have not. As I say, I'm not even aware that "shooting colors" was actually ever done in real combat (even while by the later half of WWII even the previously oblivious british were issuing dyes for the KGV battleship shells, and I know for certain the Iowa class battleships had assigned colors on their own, I just don't know if any of those were actually fired in battle). I also recall reading somewhere the quote from an US officer on the american Taffys during Samar that went along the lines of "they're shooting us in technicolor!", which would likely mean dyes were used there. But I don't even know where I read that one, much less be sure it's not an apocriphal story (it's a funny as heck one though XD) 

Long story short, what's me, I just can't say how effective it was. Maybe someone else around does.


Longest range hit ever scored is a tie between Warspite on Giulio Cesare, and Scharnhorst on Glorious. Both at around 27000 yards, it's impossible to know which of both was actually the longest range hit scored. There are (unfounded) claims that Yamato scored a 18'' hit on White Plains off Samar from farther than 30km - but evidence shows that it was a near miss with a shell that had fell short exploding pretty much next to the american carrier's hull - close enough to do very significant damage, but still does not qualify as a hit. Pretty much academic, the damage that shell caused made White Plains being belching a massive cloud of smoke and Yamato, thinking she was done for, switched targets to another ship. Had she kept on firing she'd scored a hit with almost total certainty in the next couple salvos, as it's plain to see her firing solution was perfect. But that's the old "could've, should've....didn't" thing all over again. Be it as it was Yamato didn't score a hit, so the longest range hit ever registered is still the aforementioned tie between Warspite and Scharnhorst.
 

Edited January 10, 2020 by RAMJB

[akd]

There was further integration and improvement to "concentration fire" (more than one ship firing on the same target) and distribution of fire both through dedicated fire control channels and ability to integrate this information into computers, but this is very late in the era.    But prior to that there were some other rudimentary aids other than dye marker shells to coordinating fire and firing solutions.  Range clocks facing to the rear allowed the next ship in line to see what range the preceding ship was firing to, and bearing marks on rear turrets allowed the same for bearing. Note that all of this was at best within a single division of ships.

Far cry from how things are in the game were a single destroyer can play spotter for an entire fleet firing on an opposing fleet.

French actually developed the dye markers in the interwar period, IIRC.

range clock

turret bearing marks

Edited January 10, 2020 by akd

[Teckelmaster]

Amazing.

But i think to remember that actually at the same battle of samar the japanese used those color coded shells, would have to dive back into that, though. ( only now you mentioned it, it struck something i cannot really say for sure)

Thank you.

[DougToss]

28 minutes ago, Teckelmaster said:

And could we not make a sticky thread where we abuse RamJB‘s knowledge and let him share it? I mean, it is so entertaining to read, now i want that „basic“ knowledge i just received about finding solutions in a similar fashion for propulsion, armor, actual gun generations etc. and since it is difficult to scroll through all those threads to find something specific, i request:

Admiral RamJB‘s table for naval warfare thread. 
 

Just saying...

Ideally an in-game encyclopedia and the UI will present all of that information as well as the game manual. I'm thinking the Civilopedia is a particularly good example. 

With the example question you asked, clicking shell dyes in the tech screen or what-have-you UI element or looking it up in the encyclopedia would bring up an entry like:
 

Quote

Splash Colors - In group actions, when more than one ship is firing on the same target, it is difficult to determine which shell splashes are from which ship. This is important to know in order for each ship to be able to accurately adjust its fire onto the target. The solution was "Splash Colors," first used by the USN during Force Battle Practice in 1930 and in use by most navies during World War II. The void space between the armor piercing cap and the windshield for AP projectiles was filled with a colored dye by the shell manufacturer. The dye is seen when the shell impacts in the sea and colors the resulting splash - hence the name. By using different colors, each ship could distinguish between their shells and those fired by other warships. In the USN, the dye was a dry powder which was packaged in paper bags. Interestingly, the USN used this dye to compensate for minor weight variations that crept in during the projectile manufacturing process. For example, the 16 inch (40.64 cm) Mark 8 AP had a nominal 1.5 lbs. (0.68 kg) dye bag, but this was allowed to be as large as 3.0 lbs. (1.36 kg) in order to bring underweight projectiles up to the standard weight of 2,700 lbs. (1,225 kg). Usually, a particular color was assigned to each ship. For example, the colors used by the USS Iowa (BB-61) class battleships were as follows:

      USS Iowa - Orange
      USS New Jersey - Blue
      USS Missouri - Red
      USS Wisconsin - Green

As far as @RAMJB goes, I appreciate his information in context but it's probably too demanding to ask a forum's member to write an entire naval history of the period! Someone could make a thread compiling his posts though, I've seen that done on other forums. Your best bet to getting up to speed may be the Reference Materials thread on the forums here.

Edited January 10, 2020 by DougToss

[RAMJB]

9 minutes ago, Teckelmaster said:

Amazing.

But i think to remember that actually at the same battle of samar the japanese used those color coded shells, would have to dive back into that, though. ( only now you mentioned it, it struck something i cannot really say for sure)

Thank you.

Yeah, the technicolor quote I mentioned in my post comes from that battle. I'm not sure it's not apocryphal though. I don't even remember where the heck did I read it, for crying out loud, so...

What also remember now is reading about how USS Atlanta was aknowledged as a case blue-on-blue because before going down green (or blue, I just damned can't recall xDDD) dye was seen on her. And that dye (green, or blue, whatever it was) was USS San Francisco's "color", certifying she had been hit by SF's 8in guns at least once.

But again, it's something I read somewhere a good while ago, and I don't like to go on "things I heard about" which I don't have a solid source between my hands to cite that mentions it too. I don't even know if that was true, or yet another of those things you "read in the internetz"...but I guess it can be mentioned with the proper "Is just something I heard somewhere" disclaimer in capital letters ;).

Edited January 10, 2020 by RAMJB

[RAMJB]

Ok, seems it didn't take that much to confirm that one:

Meanwhile the San Francisco , which had altered course to 280° T., shifted fire from her stricken enemy ship to a “small cruiser or large destroyer further ahead on the starboard bow. [This vessel] was hit with two full main battery salvos and set afire throughout her length.” The range was 3,300 yards. At about the same time, as nearly as can be judged, a heavy cruiser came up on the Atlanta ‘s port quarter and opened fire at a range of about 3,500 yards, bearing 240° R. The Atlanta reported that 19 hits were scored on her with 8-inch armor-piercing ammunition. Although many of the projectiles failed to explode, her hull was holed several times, and her damaged bridge was shattered. The shells were loaded with green dye, the San Francisco ‘s color. As the first shot struck, Capt. S. P. Jenkins of the Atlanta rushed to the port side to get off torpedoes. When he returned to starboard, Admiral Scott and three officers of his staff had been killed, as well as a large number of other personnel. The foremast collapsed, fires were blazing everywhere, and the Atlanta was dead in the water.

 

https://usssanfrancisco.org/memories/cruiser-night-action-12-13-november-by-jerry-holden/


And it was green dye then.

Now what the heck whas USS San Francisco doing shooting dyed projectiles in a night engagement when nobody would be able to distinguish them, don't ask me.

Then again she was shooting blue on blue, so I guess asking "what the heck she was doing" about her shooting dyed shells is a little bit out of place anyway xDDDDD

Edited January 10, 2020 by RAMJB

[akd]

Lot's of anecdotes in this thread:

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=162349

[RAMJB]

9 minutes ago, akd said:

Lot's of anecdotes in this thread:

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=162349

Hey! someone in that thread makes mention of the technicolor quote!!!!!.
 

Glad to see I wasn't somehow remembering imagined stuff XDDDD. 

[DougToss]

21 minutes ago, RAMJB said:

Now what the heck whas USS San Francisco doing shooting dyed projectiles in a night engagement when nobody would be able to distinguish them, don't ask me.
 

I would guess that the ammunition was packed with dyes by the ordnance men once it was received from the depot. If naval shells are handled like the artillery, you break down the pallets issued from the base stores, distribute shells, and then when going into action set the powder and fuse. The shells you have are the shells you have though.

[Teckelmaster]

Hello

 

of course i do not expect ramjb to do a wiki all on his own here, but he has so much written all over the place and it must be so much work already, i just think some of those essays should be put together in a single thread, because it is a shame if such information gets lost in the nirvana, once patch 66 is no longer up to date. I think he has more than anyone else put together here, not that i want to put the other members efforts aside, but his contribution is just on this side of crazy stuff (the good version of) lets copy paste it in his own thread and that must come close to a book, concerning quantity. 

 

[roachbeef]

The 9" gun has higher ROF than the 8" ROF. Is that a bug?

[akd]

9 minutes ago, roachbeef said:

The 9" gun has higher ROF than the 8" ROF. Is that a bug?

Of the same mark?

[roachbeef]

1 minute ago, akd said:

Of the same mark?

Custom battle with 1940 and everything unlocked; 3"-11" all have Mk. 5 with exception of 8" which only has Mk. 4; think the Mk. 5 is missing

[arkhangelsk]

I'm pretty sure I saw it back when the cheat mode was on. There seems to be two or three groups of guns, with 9" being the bottom of the big guns group, and 8" being the top of its group, so it'll get its Mark 5 just a wee bit later than either 9" or 7".

Still, I must say that radar comes on a little too fast in the current scheme - by 1930 you have Radar II so if you to guarantee a no radar fight you have to forgo things like the larger torpedoes.

[Cptbarney]

4 hours ago, arkhangelsk said:

I'm pretty sure I saw it back when the cheat mode was on. There seems to be two or three groups of guns, with 9" being the bottom of the big guns group, and 8" being the top of its group, so it'll get its Mark 5 just a wee bit later than either 9" or 7".

Still, I must say that radar comes on a little too fast in the current scheme - by 1930 you have Radar II so if you to guarantee a no radar fight you have to forgo things like the larger torpedoes.

I think gen 2 radar is that radar thing the muricans made in 1938 which was better than the previous in 1933-35(?). Not sure if the game will go from 1940-1950 to shove radar gens 1-2 there and have somekind of protoradar in the 1930's that isn't as good and provides worse bonuses in general.

[RAMJB]

14 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

I think gen 2 radar is that radar thing the muricans made in 1938 which was better than the previous in 1933-35(?). Not sure if the game will go from 1940-1950 to shove radar gens 1-2 there and have somekind of protoradar in the 1930's that isn't as good and provides worse bonuses in general.

The only radars in 1935 were experimental, had a very limited range, the resolution of the pre-fix hubble telescope, and weren't fitted to operational units.

First seagoing radars were german, the Seetakt, and that one was quite limited in it's abilities. The British followed very closely almost at the same pace. 1938-39 should be the lower end limit for the first radar technologies to come online in game, as they were in history.

And the US wasn't in the vanguard of radar technology. Germany and UK were, and their early war sets were terribly limited in anything that wasn't detection purposes. The americans jumped into the radar race and took it by storm during WW2 but that was only AFTER they had been given the technology the british had developed, including the revolutionary magnetron.


Gen1 radar in game should simulate the first, early WW2 sets able to do search and very limited FCS assist roles. 1940 tech.
Gen 2 should be centimetric wavelenght radars in their first iterations, that allowed for blind fire control but were quite touchy and still of limited capabilities (1942 tech).
An hypotetical Gen3 should be end-WW2 radar sets, much more reliable and powerful, corresponding to the 1944-45 sets.

And there should be no radar in the mid-30s. Because there was no radar then.

Edited January 14, 2020 by RAMJB

[Cptbarney]

2 minutes ago, RAMJB said:

The only radars in 1935 were experimental, had a very limited range and the resolution of the pre-fix hubble telescope.

And the US wasn't in the vanguard of radar technology. Germany and UK were, and their early war sets were terribly limited in anything that wasn't detection purposes. The americans jumped into the radar race and took it by storm during WW2 but that was only AFTER they had been given the technology the british had developed, including the revolutionary magnetron.
 

Yeah, i know but what im saying is too counter the effect of having radar being too good you can do the above and make it far better in terms of progression (maybe even expand upon that so radar prototype ranging from mark 1-3? or something?).

Also i would mind seeing the game go as far back as 1880 or 1860 (birth of the ironclad). (unless they are in age of sail then ignore lol). Maybe 1875.

[RAMJB]

No. To counter the effect of having radar being "too good" (which only really was since the introduction of centimetric wavelenghts in sets with proper power output, and that didn't happen until 1943), is for the player to focus on that technology in the campaign mode.

Radar was a revolutionary piece of equipment, specially as it became more developed and reliable, and *WAS* a defining factor in determining naval technological superiority. So should be in this game too. No need to "compensate" for it.

I think the early date cutoff in 1880 is the earliest the game can go. Go earlier than that and suddenly the game has to emulate sail power; not to mention the literally dozen of hulls (some truly unorthodox) that were common in the ironclad era. Which is one I also find exciting and highly interesting, but one that would force the game to spend far too much resources on, considering the scale of what it already intends to cover.

Edited January 14, 2020 by RAMJB

[Angus MacDuff]

4 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

Maybe 1875.

Yeah.  1860 saw the birth of HMS Warrior which still had sails and was a broadside ironclad.  that's probably stretching too far.  Monitor was turreted, but that class was really not ocean-going.  1870's saw proper pre-dreadnoughts, I would say.  No sails...trainable turrets...

[Cptbarney]

Just now, Angus MacDuff said:

Yeah.  1860 saw the birth of HMS Warrior which still had sails and was a broadside ironclad.  that's probably stretching too far.  Monitor was turreted, but that class was really not ocean-going.  1870's saw proper pre-dreadnoughts, I would say.  No sails...trainable turrets...

Yeah i just saw the french first pre dreadnought made aorund 1873-75, that way we can experience the birth of the old dreadnought and play to the birth of the modern battleship.

Kinda wish the pre-dreadnought era lasted longer, i do like the ships they had back then and im surprised how much i like the look of them, maybe alternate game modes where you can lock tech or make tech eras last longer be included?