"Extreme" ship range

[smacktoward]

The ship designer offers four choices for range: short, medium, long and "extreme."

I get why you might choose short, medium or long:

• Medium is the good all-around default choice
  
• Short is for when you want to save weight and are willing to give up some mobility (like the ability to transit hostile sea zones in wartime)
  
• Long is for ships tasked with running down other ships (e.g. raiders and raider-hunters)

But what's the use of extreme? Is it just "long++", a way to build a ship that can evade even long-ranged opponents? Or is there some other reason to pick it that isn't obvious?

[worldwarli]

I think Extreme range is for raiders and raider-hunters operating far from your home seazone so they can operate for some time without requiring refuel.

[director]

I've never used it - but I move away from surface raiders after 1910-12 anyway.

[Roumba]

I've also never bothered with extreme range. With Reliable engines and Long range I was never worried.

[fishy]

Might be useful for blockades?

[aeson]

Feb 11, 2018 6:54:05 GMT -6 fishy said:

Might be useful for blockades?

Maybe, but with blockades in sea zones where you lack sufficient base capacity to support your fleet the greater threat to your ability to sustain a blockade tends to be battle damage, especially if you're trying to blockade a near-equal opponent, whereas if you do have sufficient base capacity in the sea zone to support your fleet then long or extreme range is irrelevant and short range is only a problem if it's not (one of) your home sea zone(s).

[rimbecano]

I rarely find battle damage to be a limiting factor in blockades unless I have no base capacity in the relevant sea zones and battle damaged ships are being interred.

[Airy W]

I believe extreme range means steaming from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok without taking on more coal. So either this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Pamiat_Azova
or this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)

[Enderminion]

Feb 20, 2018 21:50:06 GMT -6 Airy W said:

I believe extreme range means steaming from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok without taking on more coal. So either this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Pamiat_Azova
or this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)

all the vast majority of nuclear powered ships can do that

[director]

I find it interesting that we went, from 1900 to 1980 or so, through a change in what speed and range meant. In earlier years, what was valuable was spurts of high speed being useful in a tactical sense and slow economical speed acceptable for strategic use. Oil firing made high sustained speeds achievable, and today speed is less important from a tactical sense while high sustained speed is necessary for strategic movement.

[dorn]

I did some comparison between ranges and effect on costs and maintenance costs. 

I used CA design in 1903.

It is quite interesting to see that different between short range with cramped accomodation and engines tuned for speed and medium range with normal accomodation and engines normal is really minimal. It is very similar with long range. It is going up a lot for extreme range.

My conclusion is that making ships short range only saves only 1.5 % of the costs so it is negligible and should be done only for ships you are completely sure they will never leave area at war. Going to cramped accomodation and engines tuned for speed has minimal effect to increasing from 1.5 % saves to 3.3 %, still negligable.

I think that these type of savings are going to be interesting only in case the tonnage is limited factor.

Table

CA for info (medium range)

EDIT: The percentages are only for example above however she 25 knots CA in 1903 with varied tech disadvantage to engine so there would be even less difference in all CA and capital ships as their speed/tech would be lower. Hoever it could work differently for CLs where a lot of tonnage is spent on engines.