Ship Performance

[oldpop2000]

As you know, a ship with a dirty bottom is slower than a ship with a clean bottom. To clean the hull of a ship, requires a shipyard capable of handling the ship and a dry dock large enough to perform the necessary work. Example: At Jutland the HSF knew it was leaving on an operation so it cleaned the bottoms of all its ships. The necessary dockyards were closer to their anchorage. Unfortunately for the Grand Fleet, anchored in Scapa Flow, that wasn't the case, they could generally only send one ship at a time to the nearest dockyard which was on the eastern coast. You can lose about 1 to 3 knots of speed due to a dirty bottom and the longer you wait, the dirtier it gets. The lose in speed depends a lot on the design but that is close. So, my question and/or suggestion is that this function be included somewhere in the game. The longer the ship stays out of the dockyard, the slower it should get by a small amount. However, one to three knots can make a big difference in many cases. It should be obvious that the faster the ship is moving, the more turbulence the dirty bottom is creating and therefore slowing the ship down. The formulas are complex but that is the simplistic view me. 


Just an idea. There are many more.

[stevethecat]

'Fouling' is the word you are after.

maritimecyprus.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/fouling.jpg


And yes it can be a pain in the backside. I would agree with it's inclusion but maybe the effect could be diminshed over time with improvements in anti-fouling paint.

For a bit of history the Royal Navy got so sick of fouling on the early Iron ships that they considered scraping the lot of them and going back to wood+copper sheath for the outer layer, making wood-clad iron ships instead of iron clads. It wasn't until decent anti-fouling paints were developed that the issue became more of a nuisance rather than critical.

[centurionsofrome]

I'd say give the ship a 10% speed penalty when they get the (o) flag. That shows up next to the year built.

[Blothorn]

Scraping the hull is quick and performed regularly compared to the 4+ month overhauls; it is much easier on realism to assume it happens in the background (and is one of the factors in otherwise-available ships occasionally not showing up in battle) than to include it in the 10-year overhaul.