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Post by rimbecano on Aug 10, 2019 22:44:47 GMT -6
Gunnery practice was almost always slated to make things look good - stationary or slow targets, good daylight weather, short ranges and so forth. My belief is that combat was always poorer shooting than exercises (not a surprise to anyone here) and that long-range gunnery (that war-winning tactic so loved by the Japanese and US navies) was a fantasy. As axe99 says, in our wargames we find ourselves constantly closing the range to get hits. We don't do that because we are stupid or reckless (well, you guys aren't) but because we (almost always) must get hits to win. What do we see from actual combat in WW1 and WW2? Navies closing the range, or not getting any significant number of hits. In actual battle, nobody could shoot well enough to make long-range fire effective - you ran out of ammo before enemies. In WWI you have Dogger Bank and Jutland, which were mostly fought at long ranges. WWII saw very little in the way of daytime, fair-weather actions to judge by. You've got Komandorskis and one of the battles in the Med (I forget the name), and I think that's about it. Denmark Strait might qualify, and Surigao Strait was at night but fought at long range with radar (though it might be considered more fish-in-a-barrel gunnery practice than combat).
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Post by Gerack on Aug 10, 2019 23:16:30 GMT -6
Something to bear in mind: you don't have to hit a turret to put it out of action. A graze to the barbette or a nick on a barrel (admittedly, physical contact made if not a full-on impact) can cause a crew to cease fire while an inapection is made. Damage to engineering, in the way of electrical and/or hydraulic failures, will do the job. In low visibility, loss of radar, or damage to range-finders and gunnery control stations can do it. If turrets share a common magazine, power line, hydraulic piping, ventilation, etc and et al then ship damage can absolutely affect its firepower even if the turrets are not actually hit. Definitely this. A hit in the general area of the turret can make splinters that damage the turning or elevation gear, or the reloading mechanism, or the power supply or... If you look at all the stuff needed to make a turret work, rather than just at the armored part with canons, turrets take up a large proportion of the ship's volume. And besides, from a gameplay perspective, I think it's balanced: the same amount of guns in fewer turrets costs less displacement but it means that if one breaks, a larger proportion of your firepower goes away.
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Post by director on Aug 11, 2019 2:23:49 GMT -6
rimbecano - my take is that Dogger Bank and Jutland were fought at long range for the visibility, not at anything like the maximum range of the guns. The bulk of the hits were achieved at expected battle ranges. I'm not saying that no-one ever opened fire at long range, or never scored hits at long range. I'm saying that the tactic of using accurate long-range fire to disable an enemy past the range at which he could effectively return fire was a bust, first because it didn't work and secondly because no-one attempted to use it in actual battle. Commanders who held the range open were trying to disengage; commanders who wanted to fight closed the range. Simple, I think, as that. For WW1 and WW2 you can tot up the number of hits made at 20,000 yards or more - and it is not a lot, given the number of guns that are firing. Over and over we see commanders closing the range (as at Denmark Strait, which you reference) in order to get to a range where they could score hits. The Komandorski Islands action was exactly the battle the pre-War US Navy wanted to fight, a lab experiment in whether the US Navy could get accurate hits on a target outside the range at which the enemy could return effective fire. The theory failed: the action is notable for the high expenditure of ammunition and the low number of hits. Wave motion, humidity, wind, changes in wind at different places and altitudes, extremely minute fractions of a degree difference in gun elevation, angle of target, interference from multiple guns in a turret... the list goes on and on. Those factors were not subject to knowledge, solution or perfect compensation and hence gunnery remains a probabilistic exercise at anything greater than point-blank range. Even Admiral Lee's floating gunnery school, USS Washington, firing with radar range-finding at a target that was not firing back at her, at almost point-blank range, did not land all shells on target. There are just too many factors that cannot be determined or compensated for. My belief is that the effort the US and Japan put into developing accurate gunnery at the extreme limit of the guns' range was wasted. It was simply beyond the limits of physical gunnery and will forever remain so, barring active guidance and course correction... and missiles still miss. Anyway, that's my opinion.
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Post by rimbecano on Aug 11, 2019 5:06:44 GMT -6
For WW1 and WW2 you can tot up the number of hits made at 20,000 yards or more - and it is not a lot, given the number of guns that are firing. Over and over we see commanders closing the range (as at Denmark Strait, which you reference) in order to get to a range where they could score hits. But Holland didn't close the range to score hits, he closed to avoid plunging fire. She landed 9 main battery rounds of 75 fired, which is over 10%, which is quite decent. Then there's Surigao Strait, where West Virginia landed a shot on her first salvo at 23,000 yards. If you're taking extreme range rather than merely long, then yes trying to hit at 35 or 40 kyd was likely a waste of time. By WWII, 20 or 25 kyd really wasn't a waste, however.
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