Ships surviving magazine explosions & surviving crew.

[Dave P.]

Hi all,

1) I've seen quite a few ships in this game now that (both mine and the AIs, so I don't think it's just the AI cheating) have flash fires or ammo explosions and are often somehow still afloat afterwards. And even continuing to fight or surviving the battle. But many late nights watching the History Channel left me with the impression that magazine explosions usually leave a ship rapidly sinking and sometimes (in the case of smaller ships like DD/TBs) traveling rapidly in several different directions. What is the actual truth here?

2) It would be nice if sinking ships didn't always guarantee 100% crew fatalities. Just from a flavor text standpoint even - I wouldn't even think the crew XP and recruitment mechanics would have to change. Just lie and tell me that, say, 60% of the surviving crew managed to find a lifeboat when the ship started to sink. (Or whatever the historical average is.) It makes me sad.

[Spitfire_97]

I'm aware of at least 2 light cruisers that survived main magazine detonations, USS Boise and USS Savannah. The Savannah survived ironically because of a lack of armour, the explosion ripped the hull enough for seawater to douse the fires, but not enough to sink her. The heavy cruiser USS New Orleans also survived the detonation of her forward magazines, an explosion powerful enough to tear her entire bow off, yet she managed to limp back to port.

There are several more examples of destroyers having the same experience as Savannah. It seems lightly armoured ships are more resilient to flash fires, since heavily armoured ships tend to contain the expanding deflagration and turn themselves into 1,000ft long pipe bombs. In-game however, I have seen secondary magazines detonate in capital ships without leading to any sympathetic main magazine detonations, I'm not entirely sure how realistic that is. 

[Littorio]

I think it varies and is currently largely RNG given their hull designs. I have seen a single 2in shell cause a flash fire that cooked off a large CA's forward turret and blew it out, only for the fire to spread internally to the aft turret and do the same thing. This was all from 1 shell of the lowest caliber currently in the game.

On the other hand, I have seen and had ships survive multiple flash fires, some of which didn't lose turrets. I find that the difference between flash fires and magazine explosions is that the latter doesn't seem to ever pop off turrets.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Littorio