Long barrel accuracy

[Jack Tung]

Please rework the long barrel accuracy as long barrel had already suffered weight and firing rate penalty, together with the heavy accuracy penalty there is no point for player to build long barrel big guns battleship. If Dev think long barrel is too OP, I would suggest to increase the maintenance fee as to simulate the effect of erosion.

There is terribly unrealistic having short barrel more accurate than long barrel, I'm not naval expert but at least it won't happen in gun shooting, seriously it is breaking the law of physics.

[TK3600]

Also long barrel dont drop rate of fire, increasing propellant do.

[DougToss]

I like the idea of barrel wear, and other realistic factors - weight being the most significant one - naturally "balancing" gun characteristics, rather than trying to gamify it artificially and creating a sort of symmetry. The tradeoffs are not the same scaling up or down, increasing and decreasing length does different things, and you would choose to do it for different reasons, in the case of shortening barrels often having nothing to do with gun performance per se but budget, weight, the limitations of your arms industry etc. 

[Panzergraf]

 

 

I made a video on this topic.
While the patch notes for 1.5.1.1 (which introduced these changes) only mention Barrel Length, the actual issue is Muzzle Velocity.
And the biggest effects you'll see here is actually Propellants and Shell Size, not the barrel length itself.

I really don't like how it works currently.
Some components, like Super Heavy Shells and Tube Powder, now have no actual disadvantage and plenty of strong advantages, while Light Shells which are supposed to give you longer range, are rendered useless because they kill your accuracy at long range. Not just reduce your accuracy, but actually give you 0% accuracy, so their supposed advantage becomes another disadvantage in addition to the lower pen and damage. The same is true for Triple Base propellants, which is less safe than Tube Powder for the supposed advantage of more range, but that advantage is no longer actually true either, as you will lack any real accuracy out to that max range and you're better off with the safer Tube Powder anyway.

Note for example the 6" guns on my light cruiser at 2:32 in the video. Only 45 caliber barrel length, which is in no way an extremely long barrel or anything, and with a supposed max AP range of 22km. However, accuracy drops to absolute 0% at 15km, and is really poor up until that point too. At 0% the game won't make any of your shells hit, and the ship won't even attempt to fire. Why? Triple Base propellants and Light Shells.

Conversely, the 7" secondaries on the Japanese battleship I've lengthened by 22%, which is the max barrel length you can add. They're still only 44 calibers long (they were really short to begin with), but still, +22% barrel length. Quite extreme, right? But they still have decent accuracy out to their maximum range.
Why? Tube Powder III propellants and Super Heavy Shells.


I think one of the biggest issues with this is that the AI simply doesn't know this. I've come up against AI built ships in the campaign that have really long maximum range, thanks to light shells, triple base, and/or long barrels, but absolute 0% accuracy past even half their max range - making them absolutely no threat at all.

I think the way this was balanced before was better. Yes, more muzzle velocity (from long barrels, propellants, shell size etc.) would give you more range, but it did come at the cost of Weight, Cost, Rate of Fire, and Deck Penetration. Could accuracy still be reduced a little bit from what it was? Sure. But not to absolute 0%. That's just silly.
 

[justMike247]

On 5/31/2024 at 12:31 AM, Jack Tung said:

seriously it is breaking the law of physics.

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

can't have the uninitiated learn that our devs wouldn't know laws of physics if they bit them in the Khyber Pass...