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[TAKTCOM]

2 hours ago, DougToss said:

In military affairs, boring is nearly universally good. It means the principles have been discovered, experimented with, tested, proven in battle, and then gradually standardized and incrementally improved. 

Sure.  Even without delving into history,  modern ships such as the Zumwalt, Gerald Ford, littoral combat ships or CV Queen Elizabeth show difficulties that may be encountered than you try to use some innovative ideas. I've also heard that Stirling submarines are pretty tricky. I am sure the list is much longer than my modest knowledge.

It is always a balance - do only "good old" and in the end you will fall behind. Build the super-modern high-tech ship of the Next Day and it will take years (if not decades) to get it to work. 

Back in WWII, I think the Royal Navy was solid. Not so impressive ships as built in Japan or USA, but reliable and generally quite efficient. 

1 hour ago, madham82 said:

So the idea one nation's ships should have a magical trait is completely unrealistic to begin with. 

Let's hope this is hull H-44 imbalance, not the entire faction😅

Edited October 4, 2021 by TAKTCOM
WAR FOR IMPROVEMENT

[Draco]

3 hours ago, TAKTCOM said:

Let's hope this is hull H-44 imbalance, not the entire faction😅

Well... it kind of is and that's also kind of okay.
German modern BB hulls have a 95+ to resistance where the H-44 class (super BB II) has 105+, so not a great difference.
That's better than the best modern/super BB hulls of all other navies bar the austro-hungarians (112+), and again that's essentially okay.
If the Bismarck took the full magazine capacity of two modern british BBs to sink properly then that means they absolutely should have higher average resistance, because, she did after all show a remarkable ability to not sink when other ships clearly would have...
However, it does not follow that vital systems like individual turrets, rangefinders, or the conning tower should be inherently more resistant as well, as indeed they weren't (read the Bismarck account i linked to on the last page of the discussion).
Rather it should leave you with a ship that does indeed have the ability to swallow potentially hundreds upon hundreds of shells without sinking, but won't necessarily remain a combat asset throughout the process of swallowing said hundreds of shells as turrets, rangefinders and the conning tower start to receive hits and come offline, even if from non-penetrating hits that "disable" rather than "blow up" such assets, as was exactly what happened for her, she had lost all meaningful combat capability within the first quarter of an hour of said shelling... despite not sinking over two hours in.

It comes back to the recurring theme of "zombie ships" that have been blown halfway to hell during a fight... buuuuut they haven't sunk yet because there's still some health-bar left and many-max bulkheads are reducing their floodablity, and so they continue to fire back... with completely unrealistic rapidity and accuracy and well after sustaining such numbers of hits that would have rendered any real world ship either completely or at least mostly combat incapable through attritional damage to vital systems.

Most turrets do not remain combat effective after being hit by capital-ship grade gunfire, regardless of whether the shell penned. At the very least they will be out of action for a minute or two whilst the crew double checks everything to ensure the next round they shoot doesn't result in a flash-fire, and in many cases the mere shock of impact will have been enough to damage rotational mechanisms of the turret, meaning large bulks of bent metal have to be cut away to restore mobility, if they can be cut away at all. In this sense turret armour is there to reduce a direct turret hit from something catastrophic (the ship blows up) to something that's "just" bad (a turret is out of action for the foreseable future) and yet in game with a high enough resistance modifier, turrets become impervious, as do conning towers and apparently rangefinders, as taking hits to this module seems (at least in my playthroughs, do contradict me here if you've found it to be otherwise) to only affect ships with lower resistance with any modicum of frequency.

I'm perfectly okay with german hulls being hard to sink don't get me wrong, but it shouldn't be harder to damage their vitals, because it wasn't, which is true for all navies right now regardless of specific resistance mods.

sorry for the wall of text here's a fish

Edited October 4, 2021 by Draco

[killjoy1941]

9 hours ago, Draco said:

I don't. I do the exact same, as you can see, if I thought it was useless why would I use it? I'm just confused as to why 12" deck armour can shrug off any deck hit at any range when it's on an H-class, while a 16" deck is required for a smaller ship to do the same, or stuff like how the same 18" guns will survive multiple pens on a 100.000t+ BB but be disabled by a few partial pens on a smaller ship... like, it's the same friggin turret right? The turret itself shouldn't be more survivable because the hull underneath is bigger, or is that just me?

Anyway I hope stuff like the number of super-drydocks that can build & maintain these monster hulls will be limited in number in the campaign. That or some similar limitations...

I'm sure Nick and gang know what they're doing, just highlighting current frustrations.

I was referring to the half-dozen or so times I've seen people repeatedly complain about AoN not working when some of us clearly understand that it does. 🙂

Again, the difference between your ship's and the AI ship's performance lies in the two points presented by Nick and myself: Resistance and HP.

Resistance reduces damage by a percentage. If you had max TDS and max hull bottom, then the difference lies between the two hulls, which is roughly 30-40 points, or around -30% damage from each hit. That's... a lot.

HP is some base value + some amount per ton of displacement. I feel pretty comfortable stating this because I played quite a bit with the "First Casemates" mission to get the guaranteed win with ramming, and it's pretty clear that the higher the difference in displacement, the more damage you can take while still dealing the same amount as the lighter ship would. This is also why you can blap any DD ever built with one 20in HE shell, while it takes two for a CL and three or four for a CA. I'm also fairly certain that this applies to at least certain modules, like the main guns. So, if your ship is half the displacement of that H-44, it has roughly half the HP.

9 hours ago, Draco said:

Jesus... literally no armour and you still had more ricochets and blocked shells than actual pens...

yeah, seems about right.

Yeah, I tried that with smaller ships and it doesn't work, because the AI clearly has a check for it so it can switch ammo types.

What @Evil4Zerggin likely guessed and correctly discovered is that no such check exists for a battleship.

What does that mean? Well, as I'm sure you're aware, in earlier versions it was possible to make absurdly over-armored bathtubs which couldn't be penetrated by even large caliber shells. In those situations, the AI would just sling HE at you all day long. So the AI has a condition under which it will change ammo type.

Writing it in English and without resorting to scripting, that looks something like this: If target type TR, DD, CL, default ammo type HE. If target type CA, BC, BB, default ammo type AP. If AP penetration calculation is greater than 10%, then ammo type AP. If AP penetration calculation is less than 10%, then ammo type HE.

What's missing is the inverse of the last sentence. e.g.: If HE penetration calculation is greater than 40%, then ammo type HE.

Or something like that. I don't know how the game is coded, I just know how scripting works.

So Evil4Zerggin made a deduction and came up aces as the enemy BB blasted his with nothing but overpens because it couldn't switch to HE. This isn't some huge flaw in the game that will be there forever, it's a couple lines of code Nick can add in a couple minutes.

Congrats to Zerggin for finding the first genuine exploit that I know of.

For everyone who hasn't completed "Numbers don't Matter" and is fed up with it, better cheese it now with your completely unarmored BBs before Nick patches out the exploit. 😁

[RedParadize]

Late game resistance is the most important metric as it is impossible to armour your deck enough to stop the larger shell. For that reason the Austro-Hungarian 51-81 kt modern battleship hull is by far the best hull with its 112 base resistance as it can absorb up to 97% of the damage with the IV citadel, AntiTorp V and Triple hull. For this reason you can make a 51kt BB that easily beat two not too bad +100tk AI design.

I see two problem with this. First, not every nation have super high resistance hull. So there a balance issue here. Second, say that hull resistance stats were to be nerfed and equalized, you still have the problem of high caliber deck hit. I would argue that past 1930 no battleship should be equipped with anything less than 18" as it cant be countered.

I personally do not like the over emphasis on super BB and very high caliber, not just because these never existed, but also because its a design limiting factor. I hope super BB and guns will have a prohibitive cost in the campaign. Simply put, many nation would have went bankrupt without the Washington Naval Treaty.

[Evil4Zerggin]

1 hour ago, killjoy1941 said:

Yeah, I tried that with smaller ships and it doesn't work, because the AI clearly has a check for it so it can switch ammo types.

Well, there is one caveat: BBs have a hard floor on mid belt of 8" so I had to leave that on. It could be that this is what's causing the AI to decide to use AP instead of HE, but I'd have to dig into the decompile to confirm.

I think the Resistance is doing most of the work, though; HE would have been more effective but I expect the results would still have been absurd at -97% Gun Damage taken, just somewhat less so. Unless maybe it can produce enough fires to reach "sunk due to extensive fire" but I can't predict that off the top of my head.

1 hour ago, killjoy1941 said:

HP is some base value + some amount per ton of displacement.

That's correct, "hit points" is proportional to 5000 + tonnage. Personally I would have preferred something like tonnage^x, where x is somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8; the current formula means that a 3,000 ton destroyer isn't much more durable than a 500 ton destroyer, but a 100,000 ton BB is close to twice as durable as a 50,000 ton BB.

Edited October 4, 2021 by Evil4Zerggin

[killjoy1941]

19 minutes ago, Evil4Zerggin said:

Well, there is one caveat: BBs have a hard floor on mid belt of 8" so I had to leave that on. It could be that this is what's causing the AI to decide to use AP instead of HE, but I'd have to dig into the decompile to confirm.

I think the Resistance is doing most of the work, though; HE would have been more effective but I expect the results would still have been absurd at -97% Gun Damage taken, just somewhat less so. Unless maybe it can produce enough fires to reach "sunk due to extensive fire" but I can't predict that off the top of my head.

That's correct, "hit points" is proportional to 5000 + tonnage. Personally I would have preferred something like tonnage^x, where x is somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8; the current formula means that a 3,000 ton destroyer isn't much more durable than a 500 ton destroyer, but a 100,000 ton BB is close to twice as durable as a 50,000 ton BB.

Got it.

Lots of good stuff here and over the past few pages, so thanks for that. 🙂

[madham82]

3 hours ago, Draco said:

Well... it kind of is and that's also kind of okay.
German modern BB hulls have a 95+ to resistance where the H-44 class (super BB II) has 105+, so not a great difference.
That's better than the best modern/super BB hulls of all other navies bar the austro-hungarians (112+), and again that's essentially okay.
If the Bismarck took the full magazine capacity of two modern british BBs to sink properly then that means they absolutely should have higher average resistance, because, she did after all show a remarkable ability to not sink when other ships clearly would have...
However, it does not follow that vital systems like individual turrets, rangefinders, or the conning tower should be inherently more resistant as well, as indeed they weren't (read the Bismarck account i linked to on the last page of the discussion).
Rather it should leave you with a ship that does indeed have the ability to swallow potentially hundreds upon hundreds of shells without sinking, but won't necessarily remain a combat asset throughout the process of swallowing said hundreds of shells as turrets, rangefinders and the conning tower start to receive hits and come offline, even if from non-penetrating hits that "disable" rather than "blow up" such assets, as was exactly what happened for her, she had lost all meaningful combat capability within the first quarter of an hour of said shelling... despite not sinking over two hours in.
 

Well said, and something I would be fine with if implemented as such for a "historical" campaign option. But at the same time I think there should be an option to disable/pick nation traits and/or randomize them. That would give more replay value. They could also introduce techs that could apply the same perks to new construction (or just more hulls unlock after). Then any nation could build such ships, if they spent the research/resources on it. 

Edited October 4, 2021 by madham82

[neph]

13 hours ago, Draco said:

Im just an average gamer like the rest who just so happens to have also pathologically watched every single video on drachinifel's youtube channel in sequence

excuse me, do I know you?

[neph]

6 hours ago, Draco said:

so they continue to fire back... with completely unrealistic rapidity and accuracy and well after sustaining such numbers of hits that would have rendered any real world ship either completely or at least mostly combat incapable through attritional damage to vital systems

Amen. The hitpoint/battle damage system is reductive. I reason around it by assuming that whenever a ship dies to structure damage, it just means "we're scuttling the damn thing".

[vyprestrike]

Pausing the game with the P key (maybe with the pause button too) just after firing a torpedo and rapidly pausing and unpausing can cause the torpedo to hit your ship. Discovered when trying to take a screenshot of my ship firing torpedoes off its broadside and the ship ended up getting hit by 3 of its own torps.

[RedParadize]

UAD currently have two cause of destruction, by flooding or by structural damage, three if you count flashfire separately. I would say we are missing two of the most common way a ship go down. Capsizing is one of them, obviously. I however do not see how that could be implemented correctly without having asymmetrical damage.

There is also the crew. Now that we have them, it would add allot to also have a destruction by "crew damage". Not quite a ship destruction even, more like a pre-destruction state. Flooding, death, wounded and fire... At some point there is too much stuff is going wrong at the same time for the amount of crew still alive and well. Some start to panic, chain of command collapse and no one know what to do... and the ship become inoperable. It however may recover if the enemy stop firing on it, with some luck and a good crew.

I think I will make a tread about that, it deserve a good coverage.

 

 

 

[DougToss]

Related to that observation, 

[arkhangelsk]

19 hours ago, DougToss said:

@arkhangelsk what I’m trying to discuss here touches on things outside of wikipedia articles on British battlecruisers. Read Rules of the Game or don’t, but what you inadvertently did is show how an amateur understanding of hardware misses the point. Even the articles you linked demonstrate that hardware was not the determining factor.

The first step to being nicer is to assume less than the worst of your opponent.

Yes, darn it, I have that book. In fact I have the paper version, too. Also, what do you think I was referring to when I said:

Quote

Today, we are mostly looking at Resistance, the abstraction of everything that makes a ship tougher, which may even extend beyond structural points to include crew practices.

Doesn't that imply I'm aware of the less than safe crew practices aboard British battlecruisers?

Quote

Oh just make your excuses, but these things did happen.

Doesn't that imply I might just be aware of the mitigating factors that can be put up?

And while Wikipedia might not be the most glamorous source in the world, I'd like to point out I replied to a post that had no cited sources of any kind.

I will also point out that it is not only the British who made tactical and handling errors that day that led to their battlecruisers taking un-necessary damage. Lots of un-necessary damage.

 

But they survived, and today's discussion is about Resistance.

Quote

 

why that was something called “resistance” and not the result of practices in the BCF after Dogger Bank.

 

You might remember that it is only in this iteration that we even had any kind of "crew" at all. Thus, if you want to represent the idea that one nation's crew may have sloppier practices, it has to go into one of the hull characteristics, like Resistance.

[DerRichtigeArzt]

Will hulls be limited by nation as they are now or will we set a number of requirements when we research them, and the game will give us a hull that fits our needs the most. 

Eg: im playing japan. 

I need a fast, long range, quite large, long hull for my battleship, bc I just won a war with w russia and took some of thier baltic possessions. And the game will be like: aw yep m8 u need this great hull I have for the year 1925, in history the british used it but since now you as japan have a global empire, here have at it. And if the British got krumped by the krauts they could do with a super battleship like yamato since now that they lost all thier empire and range is not an issue. 

 

What I am getting at is, random tech option. Lemme check a tick for it, and allow me to research tech of other nations, and not in the same order it was invented as well. Would be cool. 

[arkhangelsk]

18 hours ago, Draco said:

In that sense the abstraction actually works pretty well.
The problem is when it's also the ONLY thing that flash fires, engine damage, turrets & fire-control knocked out ect. relies on... especially when certain hulls of certain navies have inherently more resistance than others, allowing them to stack up the bonuses to ludicrous levels.
I think the general idea of resistance is sound enough in theory, but if resistance also determines the likelihood of certain modules that are equally easy to damage on all hulls of all navies regardless of displacement or specific design choices IRL, then we end up with situations where ships that in reality were rendered combat incapable within the first few hits scored of an engagement (bismarck & scharnhorst) are able to keep fighting effectively for far longer than they would realistically in the game... which makes me sad 😥

I'm a bit half and half on this point, because it's also possible that different designs (and also crew practices ... that has to go into "Resistance") might mean some engine rooms can take more damage before they completely crap out, or some magazines are less likely to blow up (flash fire) than others.

We also have to factor in how "modular" damage sometimes doesn't do justice to the way a real ship is interconnected. It may be possible, for example, that the British turret itself is as tough as the German one. But the electrical systems are not and when that goes down the turret will be unpowered and useless. If you just make the British turret as tough, you cease to reflect that at all, and making the British turret a bit "crunchier" along with the rest of the ship may help represent that. This kind of thing is also a consideration. 

[Draco]

27 minutes ago, arkhangelsk said:

We also have to factor in how "modular" damage sometimes doesn't do justice to the way a real ship is interconnected. It may be possible, for example, that the British turret itself is as tough as the German one. But the electrical systems are not and when that goes down the turret will be unpowered and useless. If you just make the British turret as tough, you cease to reflect that at all, and making the British turret a bit "crunchier" along with the rest of the ship may help represent that. This kind of thing is also a consideration. 

That's exactly what I've been trying to highlight. For example the Bismarck trashing her own radar the first time she fired her guns, or the South Dakota trashing her entire electrical grid when firing hers.

It certainly was the case that the Bismarck was tougher than her contemporaries, but her electrical wiring was also (for some reason) lined outside her citadel, meaning that even if no shell fired at her ever penned her main belt (as some german sources claim), her turrets were still out of action within 15 minutes og her last battle regardless because the power supply lines weren't protected by armour like the British turret power lines were.

So yeah, exactly what you said, just with the roles reversed.

[Draco]

37 minutes ago, arkhangelsk said:

I'm a bit half and half on this point, because it's also possible that different designs (and also crew practices ... that has to go into "Resistance") might mean some engine rooms can take more damage before they completely crap out, or some magazines are less likely to blow up (flash fire) than others.

Uhh... No.

Crew practices should be linked to crew experience, not resistance.

Module survivability should be linked to complexity and the armour that protects them, not resistance.

I understand that some levels of abstraction are required to keep the game simple enough in coding terms, but if all those abstractions are tied to a single value then the result is a: highly ahistorical and b: unbalanced, as all survivability issues get tied to a single modifier which then becomes the only stat that really matters.

[arkhangelsk]

17 hours ago, madham82 said:

So the idea one nation's ships should have a magical trait is completely unrealistic to begin with. 

This relates to a matter of "law" - whether this game should have National Characteristics (countries having inherent advantages or disadvantages beyond budget, industry level or geography). My thinking is that whether we like it or not, it has been clear for a long time we will be having a degree of "national characteristics", and you don't even have to peer at "Resistance" to see it. Just take a look at that first Chinese battleship (from 1890). Do you notice you can put three main gun turrets on it? Most of the other countries have designs that only allow for two. Of course, those turrets are heavy so you'll have to give something up like armor or gun size if you really want to cram three gun turrets on it, but it still represents an efficiency option that's unavailable to most other nations.

I've also noticed that (at least previously, hadn't checked this latest interation) not everyone had semidreadnought hulls. Since everyone goes dreadnought at the same time, whether you previously had access to semidreadnought hulls divides whether your predreadnought fleet goes into instant obsolescence or whether they can just about tag along in the 2nd line. Like the Chinese, I notice that relatively poorly off countries like Japan got those semidreadnought hulls.

So I suspect the intent of this game is to hand out these quiet little buffs to the resource-poor nations to make them somewhat more competitive. It's a valid choice and I can accept it as long as the buffs are not implausible. And if those buffs actually have some basis to them ... all the better. So if the Germans have a reputation for tough ships and they get allocated hulls with a bit more "Resistance", I can accept that choice.

For PoW, I can accept it got hit in a less than ideal place but there's still not an excuse for things like:

Quote

 

The machinery rooms and the reserve diesel dynamo rooms contained between them six turbo-generators and two diesel generators which drove the dynamos supplying all the ship’s electricity. Four of these eight dynamos failed immediately when the compartments in which they were situated flooded and a fifth dynamo went soon afterwards for reasons which are not known because the two men tending it did not survive.* The four dynamos supplying the rear half of Prince of Wales were among those that had failed. In theory, it should have been possible to transfer power from the three remaining dynamos by means of ring-main breakers, but this was never satisfactorily done; such a major failure at one stroke had never been visualized and the design of the electrical system failed to cope with this emergency.

Middlebrook, Martin; Mahoney, Patrick. The Sinking of the Prince of Wales & Repulse: The End of the Battleship Era (pp. 239-240). Pen & Sword Books. Kindle Edition.

 

Quote

 

Steering Although the rudder may not itself have been damaged by the stern torpedo explosion, both the steering motors immediately went dead following the electrical failure. After several messages had been passed by hand between the main and the after steering positions, an attempt was made to change over to emergency steam-operated steering, though this was probably never achieved.

Anti-aircraft armament The four 5.25-in. turrets in the after half of the ship – P3, P4, S3 and S4 – were all without power and were too big and heavy to be trained manually. Two of the four forward turrets suffered temporary failures, but even while these were soon rectified, the list of the ship was so steep that none of the four forward turrets could swing its gun from side to side although all the weapons could be elevated. Some of the pom-poms suffered temporary power failures, but these mostly remained in action, though continually plagued with stoppages as a result of their faulty ammunition belts.

Middlebrook, Martin; Mahoney, Patrick. The Sinking of the Prince of Wales & Repulse: The End of the Battleship Era (pp. 241-242). Pen & Sword Books. Kindle Edition.

 

In game terms, the rudder went red, as did all the secondary turrets, from a single hit. Speed was reduced to 15 knots, so that's ... probably Engine 1 and Engine 2 fail.On Scharnhorst ...

Quote

 

Towards 1530hrs, off Flushing, Scharnhorst was mined in compartment XVI. Fires were extinguished in a number of boilers. The gunnery control instrumentation of the aft control centre was knocked out, as was the gunlaying equipment for all three main turrets, although all weapons were again operational within a few minutes. As a precaution Vizeadmiral Ciliax transferred to the destroyer Z 29, but Scharnhorst was soon under way and gradually built up speed sufficiently to enable her to re-join the squadron. At 2235hrs she was again mined and lay adrift for 45 minutes: she resumed on her two remaining serviceable shafts, the centre providing 16kt, the port shaft 14kt. The foretop rangefinder was also now unserviceable.

Koop, Gerhard. Battleships of the Scharnhorst Class: Warships of the Kriegsmarine . Pen & Sword Books. Kindle Edition.

 

I think that's less "embarassing" than Prince of Wales, is it not?

Quote

 

At 1230hrs on 13 February Scharnhorst entered the Wilhelmshaven locks by way of No III entrance and made fast alongside the Fliegerdeich (Seydlitz Bridge), proceeding to the 40,000-tonne floating drydock the following day. A survey of the hull revealed that the damage inflicted by the two mines was more extensive than first thought. The outer and double bottom required re-plating over two areas 90m and 35m in length. A number of gun turrets had been dislodged from their roller beds. The foundations of the main engines and some of the auxiliary plant was in a sufficiently serious condition to warrant unshipping for a complete overhaul, but most of these recommendations were brushed aside for future consideration.
For repairs and a restoration to battleworthiness Scharnhorst transferred to Kiel on 14 February after the C-in-C, Grossadmiral Raeder, and the Fleet Commander, Admiral Schniewind, had visited the ship at Wilhelmshaven.
She escaped damage during the air raid on Kiel on 26 February which put paid to Gneisenau drydocked nearby. Unsatisfactory steaming trials were run in July 1942 and Scharnhorst then moved eastwards to Gotenhafen for working up.

Koop, Gerhard. Battleships of the Scharnhorst Class: Warships of the Kriegsmarine . Pen & Sword Books. Kindle Edition. 

 

The ship was more or less ready again in half a year, only that the crew was retrained they had to go to Norway in January of 1943

[SpardaSon21]

14 hours ago, Draco said:

If the Bismarck took the full magazine capacity of two modern british BBs to sink properly then that means they absolutely should have higher average resistance, because, she did after all show a remarkable ability to not sink when other ships clearly would have...

I would like to point out that Bismarck only lasted so long because Rodney and her 16" guns closed to point-blank range and raked Bismarck with HE, intending to cripple, not sink her.  KGV and her 14"s hung back at range, firing plunging shots of AP that were again, intended to cripple and debilitate, not sink her.  By the time of her final battle she was a limping, wounded beast, and the British wanted vengeance, not just victory, after Hood was sunk, which is why they did the naval equivalent of slowly beating a wounded lion to death with wooden clubs.

 

12 hours ago, RedParadize said:

Late game resistance is the most important metric as it is impossible to armour your deck enough to stop the larger shell. For that reason the Austro-Hungarian 51-81 kt modern battleship hull is by far the best hull with its 112 base resistance as it can absorb up to 97% of the damage with the IV citadel, AntiTorp V and Triple hull. For this reason you can make a 51kt BB that easily beat two not too bad +100tk AI design.

I see two problem with this. First, not every nation have super high resistance hull. So there a balance issue here. Second, say that hull resistance stats were to be nerfed and equalized, you still have the problem of high caliber deck hit. I would argue that past 1930 no battleship should be equipped with anything less than 18" as it cant be countered.

I personally do not like the over emphasis on super BB and very high caliber, not just because these never existed, but also because its a design limiting factor. I hope super BB and guns will have a prohibitive cost in the campaign. Simply put, many nation would have went bankrupt without the Washington Naval Treaty.

Given that Yamato's 18.1" guns were the upper limits of practicality, and even then only because the Yamatos were the heaviest things afloat, more than even the proposed Montanas, the devs never should have added the 19" and 20" guns to the game.  If the USA, perhaps the most capable nation when it comes to design and construction, look at their 18" guns and come to the conclusion its possible but impractical to fit the weight and space (even compared to 4x3 16" guns!), the idea that anyone could make a functional 19" or 20" gun is utterly hilarious.

@arkhangelsk PoW was ultimately hit with four torpedoes, and the first hit would have crippled any ship, given that it flooded an engine room and all the vital spaces between it and the stern.  Further, the Type 91 was no joke, not with a 235kg warhead. To quote from Wikipedia, since I don't have a better source handy:

Quote

 Testimony from Lt Wildish, in command of 'B' Engine Room, indicated the shaft was stopped successfully, but upon restarting the shaft, water rushed in through the damaged shaft passage, flooding B Engine Room and forcing its evacuation. Also flooded from this hit were the long shaft passage itself, 'Y' Action Machinery Room, the port Diesel Dynamo Room, 'Y' Boiler Room, the Central Auxiliary Machinery Room, and a number of other compartments aft.

 

Two mines that caused significant hull damage yet unable to penetrate into the vitals are hardly comparable to the damage PoW took with the initial torpedo strike where her own propeller shaft wound up disintegrating her watertight seals along the entire length of it.  Further, your own quote mentions that the damage to the dynamos could have been routed around in theory, and that such a single, crippling blow hadn't been anticipated, therefore it is reasonably safe to assume no damcon training had been done to make such a thing possible.

 

So, we have multiple flooded vital rooms, a total collapse of power that was unanticipated and therefore not trained to deal with, as well as ongoing enemy action that demanded the attention of the ship's crews.  Meanwhile Scharnhorst was not engaged in enemy action so her crews were better able to focus on damcon, and the damage was from an external source as opposed to an internal one.

Edited October 5, 2021 by SpardaSon21

[TAKTCOM]

21 hours ago, Draco said:

Well... it kind of is and that's also kind of okay...read the Bismarck account i linked to on the last page of the discussion...

While I am not against game сoncept "Resistance" in generally, but I cannot agree with this.

Bismarck was a tough not because it was built from pure Hitlerium, had the magical Ahnenerbe runes everywhere, or was built on the ancient, mystical scrolls from era of Myths.

Bismarck was a tough because its engine and magazines was very well protected. The Germans successfully used this armor distribution since WW1, but actually anyone could use it. It's not even an armor scheme, literally "put more armor here and here."

Yankees worshiped at AoN, while the Russians invented the opposite of AoN - some kind of Armor on Everywhere (lol), French preferred the french strings - long and thick but narrow belts, while British and Italians had their own views on optimal use of armor. 

But no one forbade anyone to use the ideas of foreign countries, as it  happened with AoN after WW1. I don't understand why the game should prevent me from building ships, for example, in the German style when I play Britain.

19 hours ago, RedParadize said:

...it can absorb up to 97% of the damage with the IV citadel, AntiTorp V and Triple hull. 

While IV citadel, AntiTorp V and Triple hull are large investments, absorption of 97% incoming  damage sounds like one of the most broken things I've ever heard.

On 10/4/2021 at 3:04 PM, Microscop said:

Also hhee tough guy Goben "I wil destroy the russian black sea fleet" but in reality i will get spanked and ran away from pre drednoughts.

Yes, it's actually funny - the Dreadnought has been hyped as capable to fighting (and winning!) entire squadrons of old-style battleships. Goben was a second-generation dreadnought, a fast battleship rather than an English-style battlecruiser, but every encounter with Russian battleships ended his retreat.  Of course, Goben was alone and could not take risks, since Turkish industry could not repair it in case of serious damage. But still, complete superiority over the old ships, about was so much talk, did not happen.

On 10/4/2021 at 4:30 PM, DougToss said:

In military affairs, boring is nearly universally good.

You know, I thought a little more about this. Many of the people, who interested in navy in modern Russia would agree with you. One of the most popular topics in the Russian community - the Russo-Japanese War, always brings up the IRN ships. And I saw many notes that the Borodino-class battleships was a mistake. Not because it was a bad or ineffective design, but because it was too new and too complicated design. 

Instead, it was necessary to build simpler and more proven ships, such as the Potemkin, or the evolution of Peresvet with 12 inch guns. If we take a foreign design as a model, then it should have been the Retvizan, built by Kramp.

The same thing with dreadnoughts of the Sevastopol class. The problem was not that these ships were stuck between battleships and battlecruisers, combining "not enough speed" with "not enough armor". After all, all first generation dreadnoughts had serious flaws, one way or another. The problem was that Sevastopol class was finished too late and  brought to combat able even later. Again, the right decision was to make an analogue of the Dreadnought, using components (turrets, power plants, modified hulls) from old pre-dreadnoughts, as the Germans and Americans did.

Of course, by the WW1, such conservative designs would outdated but they would have been infinitely preferable to using ships from the time of the Russo-Japanese War against Hochseeflotte, as it happened in real history.
I guess, for the navy evolution is clearly preferable to revolution.

Ugh, another wall of text.

Edited October 5, 2021 by TAKTCOM
WAR FOR IMPROVEMENT

[Draco]

4 hours ago, TAKTCOM said:

Bismarck was a tough because its engine and magazines was very well protected.

Well, depends on what you mean by "well protected". Bismarck had a pretty average belt of 12.6", which could be penned by the 14" guns of KGV and PoW at about 14000m and by Rodney's 16"ers at considerably greater ranges still.

According to this summary on navweaps https://web.archive.org/web/20160717125302/http://www.navweaps.com/index_inro/INRO_Bismarck_p2.htm Bismarck also had her unusually thin deck armour of just 4.7" penned at least twice according to witness survivors, which amongst other things destroyed the port turbines and the starboard boiler room.
There is evidence of multiple penetrations of the conning tower and at least 25 shell fragment holes as well, and evidence to suggest internal explosions in, certainly turret bruno, and probably also turret anton, but it appears by the time these internal explosions occured, the germans had already willingly flooded the magazines, preventing a hood-like flash fire.

Bismarck's real "toughness" lay mostly in her numerous armoured bulkheads, which didn't prevent penetrations into the hull but instead kept the damage more localized, allowing more time for damage control teams to flood magazines, counter-flood opposite compartments, abandon destroyed engine rooms before they flooded outright, ect.

So you're right in that it's not even an armour scheme, it's just max bulkheads in practice, and I agree that max bulkheads shouldn't automatically be "better" for one nation over the other.

My main point was just that it shouldn't determine the survivability of a given ship's turrets (or any components not protected by said bulkheads for that matter), as both turrets Anton and Bruno were clearly mostly wrecked by rodney's first hit salvo, and then completely destroyed in subsequent salvoes, while there is evidence of at least three penetrations of turret Dora's barbette, and witness survivors from turret Caesar reporting of a single 14" shell hitting the faceplate of the turret and the resulting shock destroying the training and elevation mechanisms within.

maxing bulkheads had no effect what so ever on the survivability of the turrets, is what I'm getting at.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Draco

[TAKTCOM]

1 hour ago, Draco said:

According to this summary on navweaps https://web.archive.org/web/20160717125302/http://www.navweaps.com/index_inro/INRO_Bismarck_p2.htm

Thank you, this is an interesting link.

Edited October 5, 2021 by TAKTCOM
WAR FOR IMPROVEMENT

[DougToss]

24 minutes ago, TAKTCOM said:

Thank you, this is an interesting link.

Agreed.

 

Worth mentioning again is the need for stability and capsize:

”As previously discussed, Bismarck had excellent stability characteristics, with a substantial metacentric height (GM), large righting arms (GZ) and a great range of positive stability (see Table 5).  Such stability was necessary to offset the effects of the flooding of large off-center compartments.  As a result, it was necessary to cause massive off-center flooding to capsize and sink a Bismarck-class battleship.  As will be seen, the extensive damage sustained by Bismarckwas sufficient to overwhelm and defeat the ship, but was not of a nature to cause her to sink quickly. ”

 

 

[admiralsnackbar]

Not responding to anyone in particular but in the context of the damage ships can sustain:

I'm not against ships being as resilient as the Bismark was but in the context of the games current victory conditions (Which are effectively limited to destructions) it's not a good idea. 

Right now players don't get credit for damaging ships to the extent that (if said ship captains had any sense) they would attempt to retreat and effectively 'mission kill' the warship, and find themselves in drydock potentially for months if not the duration of the war. (in a campaign sense) There are no missions where players get credit for simply forcing the enemy to disengage regardless of number of ships sunk. 



As for torpedo damage this is how I would do it (Assume no magnetic detonators):

- Torpedo damage in game is proportional to the size of the explosive warhead

- Torpedo defense has two elements; the torpedo defense type and the extent of the protection (Given as a slider)
- Extent of protection will 'proof' the port and starboard midsections of the ship from a certain magnitude of torpedo damage, if the ship is hit with a torpedo on that side at or below the protection level the damage will be negligible. 

- Torpedo defense type affects how the 'extent of protection' affects the displacement, cost, and speed of the warship. 

- Taking hits above the protection level will still inflict less flooding than if no protection were in place. 

- Each time the ship is hit the extent of protection is reduced, so subsequent torpedo hits on the same side will be closer to the full damage. Ideally it would be based more on exactly where the torpedo hit but that's probably too precise for this game. IDK if it could be done on a 'by compartment' basis. 

Right now though I the X percentage factors are here to stay. I do appreciate the fact that they made it so that it doesn't take 30 24 inch torpedoes to sink a super battleship. 

 

 

[DougToss]

41 minutes ago, admiralsnackbar said:

Not responding to anyone in particular but in the context of the damage ships can sustain:

I'm not against ships being as resilient as the Bismark was but in the context of the games current victory conditions (Which are effectively limited to destructions) it's not a good idea. 

 

 

That’s not a lot of torpedoes, and I think asymmetric flooding, loss of stability and capsize are what we’re missing.

 

Edited October 5, 2021 by DougToss