PSA for anyone upgrading to 1.06, high caliber long guns are now paradoxically the worst weapons you can have on a boat

[vyprestrike]

If you care at all about making half decent designs with high caliber guns (18in, 19in, 20in), stay on 1.05 for as long as possible. On the surface, this update buffs high caliber long guns, but in reality, it's nerfs across the board.

I'll be using 20 inch guns for examples here since I've done most of my testing with them. 

Accuracy has stayed about the same between 1.05 and 1.06. This doesn't really make sense given that a long-barreled gun (1.06) should be more accurate than a gun with stock barrel length (1.05), but hey, there's a lot of things about this game that don't make sense.

What hasn't stayed the same is weight, reload speed, penetration, and damage. 

Weight has gone up for guns, both because of the new citadel system and because Hydraulic turret rotation has been marked as obsolete for later years, forcing you to use heavier rotators. 

Reload speed has gone down the toilet. An old 20 inch gun from 1.05 could reload in just over a minute with Auto loaders. A new 20 inch long gun, with barrel length increased by 50%, takes over 3 minutes. 3 MINUTES! And that's with the best Auto II loader available! Why would adding an extra 50% to your barrel length triple your reload time? Who knows.

Penetration for long guns has gone up in theory (according to the numbers) but this isn't actually the case. Penetration, especially deck penetration, is more affected by angle now. This means that high caliber long guns, which should have more penetration at long range, actually end up penetrating less armor because they impact at a flatter angle. For example, a 530mm/76 caliber gun with TB/TNT4/CB2 AP pens over 2 meters of deck at its optimal pen range. Yet, just 50cm of combined deck and citadel armor will cause the shell to partial pen. I tested a battle earlier where I took a ship armed with 12 530mm/76 caliber guns against a fleet of 3 large battleships. It took 30 real life minutes of endless partial pens to sink 3 capital ships. I could do the same in under 5 minutes in 1.05

Okay, fine. So my long guns fire at a third of the speed and pen basically nothing, do they still do damage? No. The raw damage has gone up sure, but because these guns can't pen anything anymore, they end up hitting partial pens over and over until you run out of ammo. 3k+ raw AP damage looks great, except you'll hit nothing but 100 damage partial pens every 3 minutes until you run out of ammo or the will to live. 

Basically, the guns that should theoretically be the best in the game are currently the worst. 

You know what is good? Nothing.

Short-barreled guns can't hit anything, but when they do hit, they tend to penetrate more armor because of impact angle magic, plus they reload faster. Again though, good luck getting them to hit anything.

Torps are also not an option anymore; they're more of a liability than an asset given they can now explode on your own ship and have a habit of not exploding anywhere else.

What's left then? Ramming.

From the moment this update drops, if you want competitive ships that can clap the AI on the high end, your best bet isn't the biggest guns or thickest armor or heaviest torps, it's making a bunch of cheap, crappy suicide ships to ram the enemy fleet to death while their guns reload too slow to fight back or are too inaccurate to touch you.

[Fenn]

Yeah that reload increase/decrease gets me, there's no reasonable explanation for that to be a thing... At all...

[Plazma]

I wanted only point out, that in reality (18in, 19in, 20in) are very uncommon guns. See list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_guns_by_caliber
 

Also you want use 20" gun, 20"! and make the barrels longest... 

Quote

Basically, the guns that should theoretically be the best in the game are currently the worst. 

they are the worse from the beginning, too big, too slow etc. 16" was the best guns. 

 

Maybe 18in, 19in, 20in need a small touch of love from dev, but right now is good. They are not OP. Maybe weakest and not used, but you know not all guns are equal. 

Btw. for 2x20"/79 reload is 128.7 and for 1x20"/79 95.3s, so I don't see 3 min here. If you testing 4x20.9"/79 GOOD LUCK. Yamato (aka one of the biggest ships in the history) have 40 cm/45 (18"/45 or I am wrong?) dual barrel. 

 

My ship with 2x 2 20"/79 and 3 3"8 guns. The dmg is not the best, but acceptable, without penetration from 20" (I chose semi round) 

 

 

Second fight

 

 

too big pen... also the enemy is very fast and I can't keep distance, because of that I can't properly aim and my accuracy hit the bottom, If I don't over pen and I will be able to keep distance the dmg will be 10 times bigger.  

 

Also I want notice that on the range 30 000 km I am able to have around 90%-100% aim. In 3 fight I was able over pen and pen also some blocks and ricochets. The AI have 18" gun and no chance... 

 

 

An last battle, I ensure the AI have a decent ship with 16" the longest barrel as possible, the results are similar 20" wins, but only on range 40km+, in close range 30km and less I see 20" are too big, too flat. 

They working in certain conditions, auto-loader, 1 or 2 barrels, long distance etc. 

 

Edited June 23, 2022 by Plazma

[Stlaind]

On the reload side of things, increasing reload time when increasing barrel length makes a LOT of sense. A piece of naval artillery is a beast only mostly related to big pieces of land based artillery, and almost entirely unrelated to anything in small arms that you might be more familiar with. In even land based artillery for the most part you can set elevation and reload with the gun elevated, but not always. Some tanks for instance can only reload when the barrel is level, and in terms of large caliber guns those are quite small in a naval sense - capping out at about 5". Land Artillery cannon typically top out at around 6", with some mortars as large as 8". To reload any of the larger pieces of naval artillery like a 16" gun, there just will not be enough space in the turret to load the breach with the gun elevated, so the barrel must be brought back to a loading position. In order to do this there's a LOT of machinery to move the barrel that will be needing to function, and as you lengthen your barrel you actually put MORE leverage against that machinery than just the extra weight of the barrel because the point of rotation is typically inside the turret face even. So as you lengthen the barrel on a piece of naval artillery, the machinery has to be more and more and more heavily built and needs to run slower in order to ensure that you're not breaking anything ... and that means your time between salvos is longer even if you have a round waiting to be rammed into the breach from a ready stock inside the turret.  Trust me, you do NOT want a 16"/50 to start oscillating because you started moving it too fast - and while that's a historical size and length from an Iowa it's STILL shorter than what you can built in game. If you start talking a 16"/78 like the game allows or even crazier a 20"/78 ..... you're going to be doing a LOT of movement VERY deliberately.

 

Even with an autoloading system, you probably will not be able to avoid this by the way. Having to move all of the auto loading mechanism along WITH the barrel in elevation adds a HUGE amount of complexity and that added complexity leads to a LOT more ways that the system can break. On top of that, building the autoloading mechanism to elevate with the barrel still requires space, which means that you'd need a larger turret, which means that the turret needs more weight in armor for the same protection, and that it is ALSO a larger target for incoming fire to hit. There's a reason that fully auto loading naval artillery were VERY rare until after World War 2, and I'm not familiar with any above 8"/203mm. 

[vyprestrike]

10 hours ago, Stlaind said:

On the reload side of things, increasing reload time when increasing barrel length makes a LOT of sense. A piece of naval artillery is a beast only mostly related to big pieces of land based artillery, and almost entirely unrelated to anything in small arms that you might be more familiar with. In even land based artillery for the most part you can set elevation and reload with the gun elevated, but not always. Some tanks for instance can only reload when the barrel is level, and in terms of large caliber guns those are quite small in a naval sense - capping out at about 5". Land Artillery cannon typically top out at around 6", with some mortars as large as 8". To reload any of the larger pieces of naval artillery like a 16" gun, there just will not be enough space in the turret to load the breach with the gun elevated, so the barrel must be brought back to a loading position. In order to do this there's a LOT of machinery to move the barrel that will be needing to function, and as you lengthen your barrel you actually put MORE leverage against that machinery than just the extra weight of the barrel because the point of rotation is typically inside the turret face even. So as you lengthen the barrel on a piece of naval artillery, the machinery has to be more and more and more heavily built and needs to run slower in order to ensure that you're not breaking anything ... and that means your time between salvos is longer even if you have a round waiting to be rammed into the breach from a ready stock inside the turret.  Trust me, you do NOT want a 16"/50 to start oscillating because you started moving it too fast - and while that's a historical size and length from an Iowa it's STILL shorter than what you can built in game. If you start talking a 16"/78 like the game allows or even crazier a 20"/78 ..... you're going to be doing a LOT of movement VERY deliberately.

 

Even with an autoloading system, you probably will not be able to avoid this by the way. Having to move all of the auto loading mechanism along WITH the barrel in elevation adds a HUGE amount of complexity and that added complexity leads to a LOT more ways that the system can break. On top of that, building the autoloading mechanism to elevate with the barrel still requires space, which means that you'd need a larger turret, which means that the turret needs more weight in armor for the same protection, and that it is ALSO a larger target for incoming fire to hit. There's a reason that fully auto loading naval artillery were VERY rare until after World War 2, and I'm not familiar with any above 8"/203mm. 

Sliding breech block. German tech implemented in the 1930s that allowed capital grade guns to be reloaded without depressing or elevating the barrels. Aka barrel length shouldn't have any effect on reload. I'm not sure if the Germans used it on their 15 inchers but I know the Americans took the tech in the 40s and used it on the Des Moines to achieve stupidly high fire rates even with an 8 inch gun. The tech exists, the devs just don't want to implement it.

[Candle_86]

you know this is correct right? The 16/45 US gun was deemed to actually be better for ship v ship than the 16/50 because the 16/50 was flatter, it could go further but it fired far flater than the 16/45 so it would be more likely to pen the deck, it was also better at shore bombardment because of this. In this one reguard the older 16/45 on South Dakota and North Carolina class ships actually could beat the 16/50 only because of this.

[SpardaSon21]

3 hours ago, vyprestrike said:

Sliding breech block. German tech implemented in the 1930s that allowed capital grade guns to be reloaded without depressing or elevating the barrels. Aka barrel length shouldn't have any effect on reload. I'm not sure if the Germans used it on their 15 inchers but I know the Americans took the tech in the 40s and used it on the Des Moines to achieve stupidly high fire rates even with an 8 inch gun. The tech exists, the devs just don't want to implement it.

Not even that.  The USA was using a fully-powered vertical sliding breech on the 5"/38.  Its just that the massive weight involved for that level of automatic loading (up to 77 metric tons including hoist systems for a DP mount) made it tough to scale up to larger calibers and shells.  One of the Des Moines class turrets weighed 458 metric tons as a result of all that heavy duty machinery, versus around 300 for one of the Baltimore triple turrets.  212 metric ones for one of the dual turrets on Worcester versus 176 metric tons for one of the triples on Cleveland.  That said, 12 rounds a minute at any angle versus 10 at only up tp 20 degrees is a big improvement, and arguably worth the weight and cost.

[neph]

Dunno what it's worth. 1890s era. Somehow I managed to create a battleship gun that is apparently better in every way but range than the foe's.

[SpardaSon21]

How the hell does a gun with a 451" long barrel have worse range and muzzle velocity than a gun with a 424.2" long barrel, especially with the other gun using heavier shells?

Edited June 11, 2022 by SpardaSon21

[o Barão]

17 minutes ago, SpardaSon21 said:

How the hell does a gun with a 451" long barrel have worse range and muzzle velocity than a gun with a 424.2" long barrel, especially with the other gun using heavier shells?

Did you check the propellant?

[slightlytreasonous]

Why can't we delete messages?

 

Devs changed all the nations base gun stats to be different, so you end up with shenanigans like that, or having different guns because every nation under the sun uses British quads.  Painful.

Edited June 11, 2022 by slightlytreasonous

[SpardaSon21]

On 6/11/2022 at 2:06 PM, o Barão said:

Did you check the propellant?

In @neph's pics?  Yeah, both guns are brown powder/black powder.