Tonnage Cost of Capabilities and SHP for Designs

[Bigjku]

I have felt for a while that the tonnage cost for certain capabilities are to light in the game so I set out to document what I could find.  So I set out to work on this a bit and see what happens.  Here is my methodology.  I am going to hold all factors but one (armor, main guns, speed) constant.  I will build a baseline design and then will see what I can get done on additional tonnage if available.  I want to see what the system seems to think is a necessary tonnage to replicate historical hulls, what the SHP is for the design and go from there.

All I am looking at here is the relationship between armor, speed and armament and how the three drive displacement.  I am looking to determine if I feel like you get a reasonable amount of additional capability for the increased displacement.  I am not looking at systems, particulars of gun performance or armor performance at this point.  I am going to do this stuff in a series for which this is the first post.

First Baseline

My first baseline ship is a reasonable facsimile of the North Carolina/South Dakota type fast battleships.  I am using 1940 hulls for the US using Modern Battleship Hull 1.  I don't have enough secondary guns because the superstructure is a bit odd but we are close enough for our purposes.  Ship does 27 knots on 131,000 SHP and weighs 48,630 tons.  I would say we are about 10% heavy and as a result we need about 10% more SHP than historical (45,000 tons loaded and 121,000-130,000 SHP historically).  We are closer to a South Dakota Class but it works.

 

Speed Adjustments

So the first set of adjustments we are going to make would be speed changes.  What does it cost us to buy 6 more knots of speed?  Historically the Iowa was pretty much the answer to that question for these ships. Its an extended hull South Dakota effectively and that extension and added weight bought 6 knots and longer main guns.  So we are at 54,130 tons and 242,000 SHP.  The weight seems light (Iowa was 58,460 tons loaded) and only had 212,000 SHP so we are running light but oddly need more SHP to make the speed.  So things start to get a little wonky.

Indeed if I push the weight of this hull as close as I can get to Iowa's actually displacement (57,500 tons game) the system will let me install 300,000 SHP and make an absurd speed of 35 knots.

Speed Conclusion

Overall I think the game is handling speed fairly ok (SHP is a bit high for each given weight but doesn't get bonkers until you go to unrealistic speeds).  If you capped SHP at some total (higher than historical unless you reprofile the calculations in the system) I think that would clear out the unrealistically fast and large ships at least with this model making it appear workable to me.

Gun Adjustments

So going back to the first baseline we are now going to adjust the main armament and see what happens.  To go to 18 inch guns it cost me about 11,000 tons (I am around 56,000 tons) to make it all work.  This is with no additional armor or speed.  Is this a reasonable number is my next question...well the best I can come up with is maybe.  It would be a very odd ship in that it would not be protected against its own guns really at all.  But I think in theory it could be done.  The ship would just be a very odd combination of not really being a fast battleship and not really being a ship designed to take a pounding either.    I can just about fit another 3 gun 16 inch turret on there but I have to lose the the tower for the 5 inch gun aft of the superstructure.

Gun Conclusion

On this particular hull I think the guns are largely driving correct displacement requirements for the hull.  It is close enough for the purpose intended.  Keeping all else the same I could either get another turret and keep the same speed or I could get 18 inch guns for 11,000 more tons displacement.  That seems reasonable to me.

Armor Adjustments

My adjustment from the first ship is to bump the armor up to levels you don't really see on ship this size more in line with a Yamato type.  16 inch belt, 8 inch deck, 8 inch turret top, 20 inch turret faces.  I can clip this in under my 57,500 cap by sticking with the original guns and speed.

Armor Conclusion

The armor I can put on seems reasonable.  Basically from the baseline ship I could up armor it to a Yamato, up gun it to a Yamato or up its speed to an Iowa.  These strike me as reasonable compromises for this hull.

Overall Conclusion

Within this one hull I think that the changes the design system forces on you are pretty reasonable.  I have stated and will continue to state that SHP should be somewhat limited to prevent some of the absurd speeds we see.  Otherwise I think the choices can and should make for unique ships if proper limits are set on the AI as far as making it choose proper baseline technology across the other categories (enough bulkheads, double bottoms, TDS ect) so it isn't way out to left field.

I have to say I was surprised at how well it did.  Having done this I am going to compare it first to some other US hulls that allow more displacement and see if the system breaks down on the extremes (based on the game I expect it does but am doubting my conclusions now that I did this).  I plan to look at the other two modern US battleship hulls and see how they work out.  I am then going to look at British hulls from the 1910's or so and see how the battleships and battlecruisers compare.

At this moment I would have to say I think the developers are on the right track more than I thought from casual impression.  Ships seem to run a bit heavy which makes SHP run a bit higher than historical.  That seems an easy fix or simply something we can overlook as long as its balanced.  The only real hard recommendations I would make that I do think need to be here is some sort of cap on overall SHP.  With that in place I think I would feel very comfortable that what the system is spitting out on this one particular hull is pretty reasonable across the range of options.

Next Installment

Will in the next couple days be taking a look at if things break down at the extreme when you have a lot more ship displacement to work with than anyone historically put to sea.  Based on in game experience I don't expect to see reasonable numbers on the very large hulls but I am open to being surprised again.

[Bigjku]

Tonight looking into what happens on the bigger hulls as we move onto Modern Battleship II

Second Baseline

This thing won't let me upload my screenshots but in making a baseline ship we encounter our first oddity.  So I am using a slightly heavy tower setup than before but I don't have a secondary barbette to worry about.  On this hull with the same armor and guns I am sitting at 62,300 tons.  That seems odd to me and you certainly wouldn't pursue using this hull for that kind of ship in a campaign situation.  It would make no real sense.  But for the purpose of this our baseline is basically the same stats as above, just heavier to start out.

Armor Adjustments

On an 86,000 ton hull I can get truly absurd levels of armor.  My build here has a belt of 20 inches, 10 inch deck, 12 inch turret tops, 20 inch turret faces and 22 inch conning tower while keeping speed at 27 knots and weapons the same.  From a scaling standpoint...this seems reasonable compared to where we started.  Compared to my earlier ship on the Modern Battleship I hull that I armored up I get 2 more inches of belt and deck and 2 more inches of turret top.  In terms of percentage gains this is really quite a lot of extra armor.  Particularly the increased deck armor.  I do have some issues with it as a feasible build industrially but we can get to that later.

Gun Adjustments

I can easily get a dozen 18 inch guns onto this ship with a displacement of 81,000 tons which being honest I think is too much.  I am getting the impression that the huge guns aren't quite heavy enough.  This ship is back at our original armor level so is very under armored for this level of weaponry.  I can actually get 8, 20-inch guns on the ship in a twin and two triple turrets on 86,000 tons.  This in my mind is very light for a ship armed this way.  Even though I haven't upped the armor.  The German's seems to have believed a ship so armed would need to be around 130,000 tons albeit being faster and better armored. The Japanese seem to have figured they could get 6 such guns on a ship of this size and of similar speed.  I suspect that the largest of the large guns simply run a little light and should have their weight increased.

Speed Adjustments

So far I have been able to play with this hull and staying at 27 knots we have kept the SHP numbers at a reasonable.  But here is where I think the model needs the most work (or frankly some hard limits).  The system has zero issues with me putting together a ship that will do 36 knots with almost 500,000 SHP.  Hell I am only at 83,400 tons but I hit the speed cap for the type otherwise I could keep going.  Keep in mind this would be 2 and a half Iowa Class ships worth of engines power.  So here is the issue...you simply don't have the physical space for it even if you can accommodate the weight.

Iowa is 900 feet long and 108 feet wide.  The game determines my 36 knot ship is 918 feet long and 126 feet wide.  We appear to need roughly 20-25 feet for each shaft alley to not have the propellers running into each other (they are 18.5 feet across).  The only way I can even begin to think that one carries this many engines would be if you were stacking them vertically and had a very high freeboard or very deep draft, which I do grant you the game says this ship has at 70 damn feet of it (which present a whole host of other issues such as which harbor could this thing actually go into).  Then you get into the fact that the props would have to be even bigger to actually put that power into the water and if the shafts can even survive turning a prop that big (newton still applies, whatever force you put into the water is torque on the shaft and they can and will snap).  Sorry but that level of SHP is just not happening.

Conclusion

As we work on the biggest and most modern ships I think we see that the system does scale fairly well but starts to break down at the extremes just a bit.  Speed in particular gets pretty whacky at the highest displacements.  What I think are needed and should be worked into the campaign are some limits on certain components you are able to manufacture.

• Armor Limits
  • There was and is a limit to how thick of a single armored plate you could manufacture.  Beyond that you had to basically start stacking plates.  Japan ran into this issues with the A-150 design.  The belt of 18 inches would have been stacked armor plates.  They couldn't manufacture a single plate of that thickness.
  • I would suggest that the campaign have a maximum thickness of armor above which you cannot go without having to stack plates.  The game should give you a warning and armor above what you can make would have say half as much effectiveness (but all the weight).  This would force you to invest in the underlying industrial capability to make the ship.
• Gun Limits
  • I think guns are generally too light for the biggest models.  Developers should look into the difference in weights in total installations.  Yamato's turrets weighed twice what a North Carolina Class turret weighed plus all the knock on effects.  Overall I don't think it is crazy out of line but I think the guns above 16 inches need some tweaking to be more displacement absorbing. 
• Speed Limits
  • There need to be hard limits on SHP if you want to force realistic compromises in large ships.  I love large ships but no one was realistically none of the 100,000 ton monsters should be burning up the seas at 30 knots plus.  To that end I suggest the following limits (and really in campaign you could make it an ongoing research thing so people have to pay their way up the chain within each technology).
    • Regular Turbines:  120,000 SHP or so.
    • Geared Turbines:  Something around 250,000 SHP (I think your model calls for more SHP and heavier ships that historical so this has to scale up a bit with it unless that is all changed which doesn't strike me as worth it).
    • Turbo-Electric Drive (really fits as a drive system, its something you do rather than geared turbines, not with them):  280,000 SHP
    • Diesel Engines:  200,000 SHP
  • This would force people to make compromises on the top end and ensure that we don't have 100,000 ton battleships running down destroyers and cruisers all over the place.  You can do an Iowa as a fast ship.  You can do a Montana or a Yamato and sacrifice some speed for armor that has a decent chance of stopping your own shells.  Or you can sacrifice even more speed and build an armored monster in the low 20's for speed.

My overall impression is that the balancing works pretty well through the modern hulls that represent ships along the lines of what we saw historically.   And honestly I think they are pretty reasonable on what you can do with armor and still passable with the guns to the point it isn't a huge issue.  But the speed thing all falls apart on bigger ships.  I had wondered why I ran into so many AI ships when I do late period fights that were 80,000 tons and tooling around at 30 knots and now I know.  It really doesn't cost you that much.  The tweaks I suggest are more geared towards the campaign mode to keep things reasonable.

I am not going to bother with the USN super battleship.  I think I have seen what I need to on the modern hulls.  I am going to look at some vintage WWI ships next and see what happens.

[disc]

I don't know about those specific limits, but I'd agree that it seems way too easy to build huge plants and guns. I think they should weigh more. Space is also not represented for power plants or magazines, which doesn't help.

Campaign might also offer a way, if the price were to skyrocket with added tech, and if time-consuming research were needed.

Japan could and did make face-hardened armor plates of 26in, but no doubt the cost would be obscene to make more than a few of them. A new or upgraded factory would need the big bucks.

The armor weights are very weird. The designer system is too opaque.

[Bigjku]

45 minutes ago, disc said:

I don't know about those specific limits, but I'd agree that it seems way too easy to build huge plants and guns. I think they should weigh more. Space is also not represented for power plants or magazines, which doesn't help.

Campaign might also offer a way, if the price were to skyrocket with added tech, and if time-consuming research were needed.

Japan could and did make face-hardened armor plates of 26in, but no doubt the cost would be obscene to make more than a few of them. A new or upgraded factory would need the big bucks.

The armor weights are very weird. The designer system is too opaque.

The 26 inch plates were the Yamato turret face plate IIRC.  I can't find if they were combined two plates or not.  However they knew for the A-150 they couldn't do the belt as thick as they wanted.  I am not enough of an expert on the specifics of making each part.  I suspect belts were a bit different than turret faces and maybe they could do one and not the other.

I agree the campaign might already be handling it.  These are just my suggestions.

[disc]

The face plates were single 660mm (or 650mm, depending on source) thicknesses of Vickers Hardened steel. This was the same type as the belt. I don't think there was a backing layer, but, if there was, it would be added to the 660mm rather than a part of it. The barbettes and conning tower were similarly 560mm and 500mm of VH armor, respectively.

I am not sure if the belt armor for A-150 was ever settled upon. I can definitely believe that composite plates were considered, as Garzke and Dulin say, but in the event it never got that far. Perhaps the hang-up was have been the quantitative capacity of the rolling mills and the hardening installations for super-thick plates.

I also have wondered if the idea was to save cost and weight by mounting relatively thin face-hardened plate onto relatively thick homogenous armor, with the idea that the homogenous armor would be integral to the ship's strength girder. 410mm VH plus a 50mm structural NVNC armor backing could get 460mm total thickness at a relatively small increase in cost and might see little increase in weight.

[Cpt.Hissy]

With hard limits, there is very common problem in games, where literally everyone will be building (nearly) exclusively designs that do hit said limit, if the factor that's being limited grands noticeable benefits.
This happens in different games and often enough to be not ignored.

Maybe better way would be to somehow calculate a fraction of ship's total displacement that can possibly be put into engines, using upcoming length-and-beam-rescaling feature. So you not only need enough displacement for stupid engines, but a hull big enough that allowed engine fraction will be big enough. And at that point hull's so big your stupid power is not that stupid anymore.

[Bigjku]

52 minutes ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

With hard limits, there is very common problem in games, where literally everyone will be building (nearly) exclusively designs that do hit said limit, if the factor that's being limited grands noticeable benefits.
This happens in different games and often enough to be not ignored.

Maybe better way would be to somehow calculate a fraction of ship's total displacement that can possibly be put into engines, using upcoming length-and-beam-rescaling feature. So you not only need enough displacement for stupid engines, but a hull big enough that allowed engine fraction will be big enough. And at that point hull's so big your stupid power is not that stupid anymore.

The implementation in my mind would be more along the lines of you having to pay for these things as R&D in campaign mode.  So you may invest a lot into say heavy armor production capacity but not as much into engine capability (only so many resources after all) and that would make for significantly different ships among the various powers and on different game play throughs.  It would also let minor powers create more interesting one off type ships by focusing in certain areas.

I was involved with a play by email wargame for 1920's naval race (no Washington treaty) where the Italian player of all people invested a ton of money into researching large guns and was prowling the Mediterranean with 18 inch gunned monsters with almost no range and almost no speed (22 knots IIRC in 1927 or so) but IIRC they were the largest ships in the world because they invested in huge infrastructure for them.  The US ended up with ships in the 26-27 knot range with a lot of armor but only 9-16 inch guns.  The British, burdened with so many old ships, ended up having a mix of very fast battlecruiser/fast battleship types and some 24 knot types.  The limiting factor that drove what you could do was that you had to do R&D for the naval guns and max SHP you could achieve as well as do industrial investment (which was represented by the capacity of each individual dockyard in terms of tons of displacement).  Those caps saw people investing in different ways and ending up with distinctly different fleets.

So I don't necessarily want caps for caps sake (though I do think SHP ultimately needs a cap just for sheer sanity sake on the speed of the monsters).  I want them to be fields you can invest in that will drive distinctly different ship types and naval composition overtime.  Otherwise I fear everything will trend towards sameness.

 

[Bigjku]

6 hours ago, disc said:

The face plates were single 660mm (or 650mm, depending on source) thicknesses of Vickers Hardened steel. This was the same type as the belt. I don't think there was a backing layer, but, if there was, it would be added to the 660mm rather than a part of it. The barbettes and conning tower were similarly 560mm and 500mm of VH armor, respectively.

I am not sure if the belt armor for A-150 was ever settled upon. I can definitely believe that composite plates were considered, as Garzke and Dulin say, but in the event it never got that far. Perhaps the hang-up was have been the quantitative capacity of the rolling mills and the hardening installations for super-thick plates.

I also have wondered if the idea was to save cost and weight by mounting relatively thin face-hardened plate onto relatively thick homogenous armor, with the idea that the homogenous armor would be integral to the ship's strength girder. 410mm VH plus a 50mm structural NVNC armor backing could get 460mm total thickness at a relatively small increase in cost and might see little increase in weight.

Yeah, the are a ton of aspects to the subject that go well beyond what we can see in a game.  Its an interesting rabbit hole to dive down for sure.

[Stormnet]

Oh, comon!!!

Me trying to keep my monster battleship at full power while doing new sacrifices and tradeoffs every update and people just ask for more balances restrictions. 

 

Please think of the unrealistic ultra-dreadnought guys ship designers...

Edited March 16, 2021 by Stormnet

[Bigjku]

7 hours ago, Stormnet said:

Oh, comon!!!

Me trying to keep my monster battleship at full power while doing new sacrifices and tradeoffs every update and people just ask for more balances restrictions. 

 

Please think of the unrealistic ultra-dreadnought guys ship designers...

Given the investment Japan had to make to build Yamato infrastructure wise I can’t imagine the basic work to build the necessary dry docks, do the harbor dredging and everything else you need to support these ships.  I suspect there is a very good reason A-150 didn’t seem to be planned to be much bigger than Yamato.  German stuff of huge size I suspect was nothing more than a pipe dream.

[Stormnet]

On 3/16/2021 at 8:58 PM, Bigjku said:

Given the investment Japan had to make to build Yamato infrastructure wise I can’t imagine the basic work to build the necessary dry docks, do the harbor dredging and everything else you need to support these ships.  I suspect there is a very good reason A-150 didn’t seem to be planned to be much bigger than Yamato.  German stuff of huge size I suspect was nothing more than a pipe dream.

Yeah, I know that this stuff would never be built (look at the little text on the bottom). Its just that, even if these ships were never built (as whoever made them needed general relativity to calculate its physical properties), I'd like the idea for end-game campaign players to be able to field these enourmous beasts during war, even if just as propaganda fleets in being.

Even if stuff like this didnt exist, to me it would be a shame if they were just a gimmics for a single custom battle/academy mission.