Gun barrel penalties?

[Id10tsyndrome]

I tried searching the forum before asking but why is there a penalty for having turrets with more than 2 barrels? Why penalize a design that has triple or quad turrets?

[Stormnet]

I think it might be related on how multiple barrels recoil can afect eachothers accuracy and how it is harder to see the splashes of each turret/barrel. Thought in real life, tech like rangefinders and good fire-control and firing salvos with a slight delay helped nearly nullify this.

[Norbert Sattler]

Gameplay-wise? So that there is a reason to use something other than the most guns per turret. If tripples were better than twins in every way, why would anyone bother to ever use twins the moment the "better" turrets become available?

And history-wise there are also some good reasons. Some tripple-turrets had horrible accuracy until they found out that the blast effects of the barrels where knocking each others shells away and they had to invent delay coils that made the middle barrel shoot a little later than the outer two to give just one example.

More barrels means a heavier, more complicated turret. Less room for the gunnery crew, less room for the ammunition hoists, more weight on a single set of motors to turn the thing and more recoil from a salvo... I'm far from an expert naval engineer, but even I know that tripples are not a straight up upgrade in every regard and that the ones that chose more turrets with fewer guns had good reasons for those choices and didn't just lack the expertise to make the tripples/quads work.

[myrsnipe]

In practice you are still better off with shooting more projectiles even if the accuracy of each shell goes down. If it's worth the weight and reduced rate of fire however is something to keep in mind. One thing i dislike is that ammunition is tied to how many guns you have, I'd love to use two gun turrets on some designs but keep the added ammunition from a three gun design, even with the increased ammunition setting it won't always be enough for long range sniping

[SPANISH_AVENGER]

On 7/15/2021 at 6:12 PM, Norbert Sattler said:

And history-wise there are also some good reasons. Some tripple-turrets had horrible accuracy until they found out that the blast effects of the barrels where knocking each others shells away and they had to invent delay coils that made the middle barrel shoot a little later than the outer two to give just one example.

 

Oh... so that's why ships like Iowa class shoot that way! (1, 3, 2) Very interesting.