Why no love for 8-inch guns.

[hardlec]

I want to build CAs with a primary battery of 8-inch guns.  Dual turrets of less than 9 inches are illegal.  That's a no-go.  Let's forget the historical ships with 8-inch dual turrets, like the ones from the Spanish-American War.

Okay folks:  If you can build a dual turret for a 12 inch gun, you can build a dual turret for 8 inch guns, 6 inch guns or even 2 inch guns. 

I am the Research Division's Bosses Boss.  I should be able to dictate the priority of which guns AND which gun/turret combinations are developed.

I'd Courts-Martial the next scientist who wastes the Navy's time and money developing a 7-inch gun, of which there are none in the fleet.

Eh.  Just a vent.  

[marauder]

Dual turrets with guns smaller than 8" are certainly not illegal, I tend to build a bunch of cruisers with 8" doubles at game start and they've never given me an illegal design warning. They should only suffer a RoF penalty until a certain technology is researched later in the game.
Does the design review button actually give you an "Illegal design" pop-up? If so there might be an issue regarding armour thickness or displacement. A screenshot of the CA in question might be helpful.

[sittingduck]

Not in front of the game right now to check but I would agree with Marauder. It seems to me that initial builds allow twin 8" as primaries or secondaries with ROF penalties. Later builds need a tech improvement for 8" secondaries. 8" inch primaries should only have ROF penalties until turret tech finally catches up.
That's off memory so I could be wrong.

[Capsized]

WING turrets with more than 7 inch guns are illegal at game start. Dual fore and aft are not, 7 inch doubles are legal everywhere. I built these super-CA for my legacy fleet:



And in 1902, once I got the wing turrets for 10 inches:



You definetly can do a CA with 7 inch dual turrets in the wings in 1899. I think I tried once and did not get convincing results.

[sittingduck]

How many Light Cruisers did that Huntington chase down and eat in 1902? I'd bet she'd thump every Armored Cruiser in her way too.

[director]

I've gotten good use from legacy CAs with an all-7" armament, but it is a sort of in-between gun: not the advantages of the 6" or the advantages of the 8" but the disadvantages of both. But in early years the number of shells you can throw matters a lot, so a massive sleet of 7" shells will get the job done.

The US Navy in WW2 had a preference for heavy cruisers in combat. Even though the throw-weight of a 9x8" heavy and a 12x6" light were very close to the same, the flag always flew on the ship with the biggest guns. This held true even when 'Brooklyn' CL's got surface-search radar and the heavy cruisers did not, with frequent bad effects. To the Navy's credit it set up intensive schools in night-fighting and empaneled experts to asses what it was doing in combat. One recommendation was to keep the 8"-gun cruisers out of night actions where their slower-firing guns were not effective and replace them with 6"-gun cruisers, with faster rates of fire. This was the formula the US used from the end of the Guadalcanal campaign on (see Battle of Empress Augusta Bay).

Admittedly the kind of CAs I build have more in common with Capsized 's designs than with Treaty CAs, but if RtW has taught me anything it is that you can win with some, um, 'interesting' ships.

[Capsized]

my Rochesters are 4x10" and LOTS of 7", good for the early 1900s but the small main battery cannot use the central firing so they will soon be mothballed and only taken out when I need blockade points (or scrapped if I have enough DDs).

Huntington and its sisters started building in 1902, done in 1904, they work like super-early battlecruisers. They did not sunk many cruisers (the Rochesters got those) but the french pre-dreadnaughts died really quickly under the rain of HE shells. It's really good as the USA because you only see small groups of cruisers and the odd B in your home areas, but the really high cost make those ships not very good if you have to take on the German or British fleet and you get out-numbered.

I'll soon re-engine my 16x10 cruisers with oil, they will gain 4-5 knots that will keep them faster than the BCs and I can do the three ships for the price of one new BC.

[director]

However, you may find that the game starts pitting your 'pocket battlecruisers' against real battlecruisers. The AI will mostly stop building CAs, too.

[Capsized]

The "pocket battlecruisers" will have a 3-4 knots advantage on the AI's BCs after an engine rebuild. They seemed to be the best use of my money saved between 1900 and 1902, when "real" battlecruisers cannot be build and even the DDs are not much better than the legacy ones. So I got the three 16x10" sisters out and after the rebuild they will take rear guard duty from the 4x10" CA while the 10x13" battlecruiser build later will take care of the enemy capital ships (playing on medium fleet size, game budget, USA).

The ships I frankly don't like much are the 4x10" legay CA. Those might be better as 7" CA (so the director fire control can be useful) with a big 5" or 6" secondary battery. I'm not sure at all.

[aeson]

Oct 1, 2018 8:15:36 GMT -6 Capsized said:

The "pocket battlecruisers" will have a 3-4 knots advantage on the AI's BCs after an engine rebuild. They seemed to be the best use of my money saved between 1900 and 1902, when "real" battlecruisers cannot be build and even the DDs are not much better than the legacy ones. So I got the three 16x10" sisters out and after the rebuild they will take rear guard duty from the 4x10" CA while the 10x13" battlecruiser build later will take care of the enemy capital ships (playing on medium fleet size, game budget, USA).

Rebuilding a ship like that for ~30 knots is too expensive to be worthwhile outside of special circumstances; you could build most of a new battlecruiser or probably an entire new 'pocket battlecruiser' with a better main battery configuration and better protection for the same cost.

Unless I start getting events threatening prestige loss (and care about it), I typically don't bother building CAs after the legacy construction program; they're little more than expensive liabilities once battlecruisers are out, and rebuilding them for higher speeds to try to make them into less of a liability is a waste of funds that could be better spent on building ships that are actually worth having.

[Capsized]

Rebuild cost for those (24->28 knot) is 50 million, a brand new "pocket BC" is 70 million (with a superfiring turret instead of two of the wing turrets, 28 knot oil, same armor level), a BC around 120 million. It's also a lot faster than building new ships.

The AI builds 24 and 25 knots BC in this game.

[hardlec]

This is an illustration of National Priorities. Jackie Fischer and the other European bigwigs considered their ships as their assets and would economise accordingly. Japan wanted the best ships, and in their heyday the Kongo class was surely that. The US Navy considered the Sailors as the principal asset of the Navy. The irony is that ships like the Iowa and the CVN Enterprise have served long enough to see Great Grandfather, Grandfather, Father and Son all serve on the same ship (albeit at different times.) Take care of the Sailors and the Sailors will take care of the ships.

As for Battlecruisers:

HMS Invincible
HMS Indefatigable
HMS Queen Mary
SMS Lützow
HMS Hood
HMS Repulse
SMS Gneisenau
IJN Hiei
IJN Kirishima
IJN Haruna

[rimbecano]

I actually tend to build 10" or 12" CAs targeted at being my main battleline until BCs become available, at which point I switch to BCs. In my current game, I upgunned them from 12" Q-1 to 12Q+1, and plan to keep them around as secondary theater garrison ships until 1920 or so, but I haven't upengined them at all.

Later on, in past games, I have built large numbers of fast, low tonnage CAs in an outsize CL role, and smaller numbers of 10kton+ CAs as heavy cruisers, generally to match AI builds of such ships in the late game.

In my current game, I have forgone CLs entirely, which frees up *tons* of money with, at least in the USA's strategic situation, no real disadvantages. Britain still outbuilt me in the predreadnought era, but my BC fleet was well developed (although mostly more Tsukuba style that dreadnoughty) while their dreadnought fleet was only just starting to hit the water when my first war with them started circa 1910, and my destroyer fleet was the largest in the world by far. They ended up starting from scratch on dreadnoughts, so in the current war, all their dreadnoughts are tied up in the Atlantic where their BCs have no chance of running into my old CAs in the Pacific. I'm planning to start building out a large heavy cruiser fleet, which I have plenty of money to do, having forgone CLs.

[ranger9000]

Just not a fan of 8 inch guns personally. 7 inchers I find do everything 8 inch guns do but with less weight and a better rate of fire. So you can cram even more in there and only suffer a slight range disadvantage, and you still out gun 6 inch ships.

Let's me build stuff like the Aso and eat everything it sees for breakfast by either burning them to a crisp or shredding them under a hail of shells.

[aeson]

Oct 1, 2018 12:29:31 GMT -6 Capsized said:

Rebuild cost for those (24->28 knot) is 50 million, a brand new "pocket BC" is 70 million (with a superfiring turret instead of two of the wing turrets, 28 knot oil, same armor level), a BC around 120 million. It's also a lot faster than building new ships.

The AI builds 24 and 25 knots BC in this game.

You are in my opinion incorrectly evaluating the relative opportunity costs of new construction and extensive reconstruction, and are moreover significantly underestimating the qualitative advantage that a new ship is likely to have over an old ship. As this is not pertinent to the topic of the thread, however, I would suggest we take this discussion to another thread if you would like to continue it.