The penalties to not armoring secondary casemates

[micromagos]

How severe are the penalties to not armoring or very lightly armoring secondary casemates on a dreadnought? Does it increase chance of flash fires? Or is it just a severe risk to the secondary themselves and whatever poor people are manning them?

[tbr]

It does increase your risk of loosing the guns and strating a fire. The flash fire risk is great for secondaries >6inch though AFAIK non-existent for secondaries 6inch and smaller. I have seen flash fire incidents with 6inch primaries though, even with on-deck mounts. There, IMO, it should not happen at all as the ready ammo would be on deck close to the gun mount and a "flash" even, while dangerous for gun crews and damaging superstructure would not endanger the ship beyond being a potential starting point for a fire. If an ammunition hoist were hit that would be different, but that would be a magazine hit in the abstraciton of the game.

[micromagos]

Okay well good to know thanks especially the size difference. I'll probably go ahead and sacrifice a knot or two of speed for armoring them in that case.

[aeson]

It bears mentioning that 2" armor is sufficient to completely protect against splinter damage (as long as you're not looking at a 6" or lighter main gun in a single mount, in which case you're looking at a shielded pedestal mount or maybe a partially-enclosed gunhouse rather than a fully-enclosed turret), and as such a secondary gun protected by 2" or more armor can only be knocked out by a direct hit. It usually isn't that practical to provide the secondary battery with effective armor protection against capital ship or often even cruiser main-caliber hits, so if it comes to a choice between having more secondary armor or having more secondary guns it's very often better to take more guns - 6" armor isn't any better than 2" armor if neither will stop the kinds of shells that you expect to hit the ship at the ranges at which you expect to be hit, and if you can have a dozen guns with 2" armor but only six guns with 6" armor then it's worth noting that losing one of twelve guns still leaves you with five more guns than you'd have had with 6" armor.

It is also worth remembering that the secondary armament is secondary - its loss is usually more inconvenient than crippling, especially later in the game when battleships might have eight 16" or twelve 14" guns rather than the typical four 12" guns of a predreadnought and practical engagement ranges have grown to the point that even 6" guns may barely reach the main battery's targets - and that if you've taken enough direct hits to a secondary battery with more than perhaps half a dozen gun positions to knock each and every gun in it out then you've probably also taken enough hits that your ship isn't going to survive the engagement and is likely already sinking.

[micromagos]

Thanks that's exactly what I was wondering as I am trying to find a sweet spot so to speak where I can get away with minimal armor yet not so low as to make the secondary's a burden. Thanks for the info!

[tbr]

My go-to standard secondary battery, before twin 5inch DP guns become available and AA space becomes important, is to use individual 6inch guns in "shielded mounts" (i.e. 2inch armour). Also take into accoount that the game as of now gives the tertiaries (for me usually 4inch, DP ASAP) the same amount of ammo as the secondaries, so it makes sense to have a greater number of secondaries than tertiaries. Hopefully we will get separate, in-designer-adjustable, ammo counters for primaries, secondayries and tertiaries (with higher maximum than 250 RGP) in the DLC though.

As long as your secondary is 6inch or less it does not make sense to armour it with more than 2 inches, unless we are speaking of predreads or early dreads with casemates, where the casemate armor serves to extend BE a bit to provide some additional protection against superstructure penetrations.

[aeson]

Nov 20, 2021 5:23:51 GMT -6 tbr said:

My go-to standard secondary battery, before twin 5inch DP guns become available and AA space becomes important, is to use individual 6inch guns in "shielded mounts" (i.e. 2inch armour).

I think the gunshields rule only applies to main guns - if you look at the secondary armament weight, every additional half inch of armor adds a constant or near-constant amount of weight and there's no unusually large increase in weight between 2" and 2.5" secondary armor, which is unexpected if you're going from gunshields on pedestal mounts to the fully-enclosed armored gunhouses of turreted mounts. For example, in a 1918 Britain save state that I have, a 14-gun 6" secondary battery goes from 466 tons at 1" armor to 1323 tons at 5" armor, with each half inch of armor adding 107 or 108 tons.

Also, this is the RTW1 forum, so DP guns may not exist.