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Post by axe99 on Aug 29, 2016 17:40:35 GMT -6
But uniquely in the USN, shipboard AAA was the last line of defense. The primary defense was the vast swarms of fighters on CAP, all controlled by radar direction somewhat more evolved than used by the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Not a lot got through that, and the massed guns of the huge US task forces then did a pretty good job on the leakers. Far from perfect, of course, but still quite good. So the US had both things going for it: huge numbers of the world's best aircraft backed up by huge amounts of the world's best AAA. Nobody else had either of these, and the lack of massive, powerful CAPs exacerbated the problems of the inadequacies of their AAA batteries. I'm fairly sure the RN used fighters from its carriers as air defence during Operation Pedestal, and know for sure that a lot of the CAP flown over the combined Allied fleet was from British Carriers - using fighters as the first line of defence isn't an entirely US phenomenon. I'm pretty sure the Japanese were flying a CAP at Midway, which is why the first wave of US attack planes got chewed up (but had the bad luck of being caught back on their carriers when the second wave showed up). On the AA, from what I can see the strength of it was based in large part in the directors and mounts - the 5"/38 was a good (and a reliable/accurate) gun, the powered training and elevation mountings and loading mechanisms, combined with the Mk 37 director, were the real kickers for their long-range AA fire. From what I've seen, the US didn't start the war with particularly great close-in AA (and still had older 5"/25s on many of its large ships), but got on the Bofors bandwagon very quickly, and like anything it turned its mind to building, built a _lot_ of them (and again, put them in good mounts with good directors). The US developed good radar for AA fire control to go with its directors as the war went on. While the 5"/38 was a good gun, I'd expect that the Japanese 127mm guns in their later mounts would have achieved much better results had they had US-quality directors, radar and training/elevation/loading/ammunition delivery systems. The thing that I think (ie, just my 2 cents, pillory/lampoon as appropriate, I'm hardly an expert is key to the AA vs aircraft contest is the balance between the development of: On the shipboard side: - good powered elevation/training and loading/hoist mechanisms. - AA fire control for fast-moving planes and dive bombing as well as level bombing. - Radar for those fire control systems - VT fuses! (thank Joebob, and can't believe I forget 'em) On the aircraft side: - powerful, but still relatively lightweight, engines that enable aircraft payloads and speeds to to increase If one gets the drop on the other (as aircraft did over AA earlier in the war, even for the US), then the other side suffers. Now, whether it's historically plausible for someone to push harder on the AA fire control such that it develops ahead of the aircraft power curve, so that aircraft have a harder time of it, is a counterfactual and by its very nature hard to answer, but I'd think it would be at least possible.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Aug 29, 2016 17:59:08 GMT -6
But uniquely in the USN, shipboard AAA was the last line of defense. The primary defense was the vast swarms of fighters on CAP, all controlled by radar direction somewhat more evolved than used by the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Not a lot got through that, and the massed guns of the huge US task forces then did a pretty good job on the leakers. Far from perfect, of course, but still quite good. So the US had both things going for it: huge numbers of the world's best aircraft backed up by huge amounts of the world's best AAA. Nobody else had either of these, and the lack of massive, powerful CAPs exacerbated the problems of the inadequacies of their AAA batteries. I'm fairly sure the RN used fighters from its carriers as air defence during Operation Pedestal, and know for sure that a lot of the CAP flown over the combined Allied fleet was from British Carriers - using fighters as the first line of defence isn't an entirely US phenomenon. I'm pretty sure the Japanese were flying a CAP at Midway, which is why the first wave of US attack planes got chewed up (but had the bad luck of being caught back on their carriers when the second wave showed up). ...... The Pedestal convoy was escorted by three aircraft carriers( Victorious, Indomitable and Eagle). Eagle was sunk by U-73, Indomitable was heavily damaged by aircraft from the Regia Aeronautica and lightly damaged Victorious.
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Post by chaosblade on Aug 29, 2016 18:03:15 GMT -6
An in-game reference tech tree list. Just to see what is available and what has already been developed. Maybe I should put this one in the "Suggestions" thread. You can list the techs you have invented (select details for a research area in the research screen) but not uninvented techs. This is also intentional, real ship designers had no idea of knowing what would and would not be invented in the future (admittedly, after a few playthroughs you have a fair idea, but still). I think Rockmedic means having a sort of Civilizatiopedia, to use a borrowed term, an in game encyclopedia with not only all the info, but historical references. Still, while I can get not being able to see some uninvented techs, the evolutionary advances should be visible, they are those techs hampered by engineering concerns and the like as opposed to the Revolutionary concerns that are impossible to predict
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Post by joebob73 on Aug 29, 2016 19:17:57 GMT -6
But uniquely in the USN, shipboard AAA was the last line of defense. The primary defense was the vast swarms of fighters on CAP, all controlled by radar direction somewhat more evolved than used by the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Not a lot got through that, and the massed guns of the huge US task forces then did a pretty good job on the leakers. Far from perfect, of course, but still quite good. So the US had both things going for it: huge numbers of the world's best aircraft backed up by huge amounts of the world's best AAA. Nobody else had either of these, and the lack of massive, powerful CAPs exacerbated the problems of the inadequacies of their AAA batteries. I'm fairly sure the RN used fighters from its carriers as air defence during Operation Pedestal, and know for sure that a lot of the CAP flown over the combined Allied fleet was from British Carriers - using fighters as the first line of defence isn't an entirely US phenomenon. I'm pretty sure the Japanese were flying a CAP at Midway, which is why the first wave of US attack planes got chewed up (but had the bad luck of being caught back on their carriers when the second wave showed up). On the AA, from what I can see the strength of it was based in large part in the directors and mounts - the 5"/38 was a good (and a reliable/accurate) gun, the powered training and elevation mountings and loading mechanisms, combined with the Mk 37 director, were the real kickers for their long-range AA fire. From what I've seen, the US didn't start the war with particularly great close-in AA (and still had older 5"/25s on many of its large ships), but got on the Bofors bandwagon very quickly, and like anything it turned its mind to building, built a _lot_ of them (and again, put them in good mounts with good directors). The US developed good radar for AA fire control to go with its directors as the war went on. While the 5"/38 was a good gun, I'd expect that the Japanese 127mm guns in their later mounts would have achieved much better results had they had US-quality directors, radar and training/elevation/loading/ammunition delivery systems. The thing that I think (ie, just my 2 cents, pillory/lampoon as appropriate, I'm hardly an expert is key to the AA vs aircraft contest is the balance between the development of: On the shipboard side: - good powered elevation/training and loading/hoist mechanisms. - AA fire control for fast-moving planes and dive bombing as well as level bombing. - Radar for those fire control systems On the aircraft side: - powerful, but still relatively lightweight, engines that enable aircraft payloads and speeds to to increase If one gets the drop on the other (as aircraft did over AA earlier in the war, even for the US), then the other side suffers. Now, whether it's historically plausible for someone to push harder on the AA fire control such that it develops ahead of the aircraft power curve, so that aircraft have a harder time of it, is a counterfactual and by its very nature hard to answer, but I'd think it would be at least possible. The Japanese 127mm guns had a lot of issues. One was the use of bagged charges as opposed to semi-fixed ammunition, where the charge is one piece in a brass case, but separate from the projectile. This allowed US 5" guns to load much faster, and to load at any angle, while their IJN counterparts had to return to a specific angle to fire, lowering their AA RoF drastically. Then you had VT fuses, which effectively made the shells more accurate by removing the dependece on a time fuse, which could be inaccurately set.
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Post by axe99 on Aug 29, 2016 19:35:03 GMT -6
Aye, I'm not suggesting the Japanese 127mm would have been as good as a 5"/38 (or even a 4" Mk XVI), but that it would have been a lot better with a Mk 37 director, better training and elevation gear and decent hoists. You're dead right that the bagged ammo would have been an issue, and that VT fuses are an important point (that's my dodgy brain again - VT fuses are very much an important part of the balance between air and anti-air, I should have included them in my points above, might edit that in now, but full credit to you . Edit: Sorry for mucking up the quote. As a random anecdote, I was watching the special features from A World at War, and they were interviewing the bloke in charge of that side of R&D, and he was saying how initially the VT fuse was turned down, and even when the people proposing it came to him appealing the decision he still didn't think it would be possible, but figured letting them spend time on it was worth it, in the off chance they pulled it off - a good decision methinks!
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Post by oldpop2000 on Aug 29, 2016 19:44:37 GMT -6
The Japanese had two version of the 12.7 cm weapon. The 50 cal. twin and single plus the 40 cal. twin type 89 mount. The latter used fixed ammunition and its maximum speed for training and elevation was 16 degrees/sec, which is pretty good actually.
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Post by axe99 on Aug 29, 2016 20:33:15 GMT -6
The Japanese had two version of the 12.7 cm weapon. The 50 cal. twin and single plus the 40 cal. twin type 89 mount. The latter used fixed ammunition and its maximum speed for training and elevation was 16 degrees/sec, which is pretty good actually. Cheers for the clarification . I'm not on top of a lot of the ammunition types, and that is a good rate of elevation and training, but it's still slower than the later 5"/38 mount training rates. That said, the point of my comment was along the lines of a lot of the importance in AAA isn't just in the gun, but what's around it, and particularly the director, radar and the ammunition handling (a quick swing past Navweaps suggests that the twin 89 mount couldn't maintain anything like the rates of fire of late-war 5"/38 twin mounts, and I'd bet good money this is due to ammunition handling*). of course, VT fuses are also very important, but I shouldn't take credit for mentioning them in this discussion . Flowing on from that, if RTW2 went into the age of carrier air, it might be interesting to have tech for these elements of anti air gunnery, to represent the developments and different issues different nations had. * Also, the vast majority of twin 127mm/40 mounts were 12 degrees training rate, 6-7 elevation rate, which doesn't scrub up near as well. According to Navweaps, if I understand it correctly, the improved mounts only ended up on some late-war DEs.
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Post by Bullethead on Aug 29, 2016 20:56:28 GMT -6
I'm fairly sure the RN used fighters from its carriers as air defence...... I'm pretty sure the Japanese were flying a CAP at Midway....., On the AA, from what I can see the strength of it was based in large part in the directors and mounts.... The thing that I think (ie, just my 2 cents, pillory/lampoon as appropriate, I'm hardly an expert ..... If one gets the drop on the other (as aircraft did over AA earlier in the war, even for the US), then the other side suffers. Now, whether it's historically plausible for someone to push harder on the AA fire control such that it develops ahead of the aircraft power curve, so that aircraft have a harder time of it, is a counterfactual and by its very nature hard to answer, but I'd think it would be at least possible. The Brits didn't have much in the way of CAP. First off, they never developed a decent carrier fighter of their own due to the whole RAF/FAA thing, so it wasn't until relatively late in the war that they started getting useful quantities of top-shelf US fighters. Second, due to their armored flightdecks, RN carriers had pitifully small airgroups for their size and the airplanes had to fit inside low hangars and on small lifts. And the armored flightdecks also limited the number and placement of lifts, so they couldn't operate as many planes as quickly as US CVs. And third, the RN never had very many carriers in the same place at the same time, so the total number of fighters on CAP at once was never very high. The IJN was closer to the USN in having much larger airgroups per CV, but IIRC they had relatively fewer fighters and more attack planes than US CVs. Also, the IJN didn't have the centralized control over the CAP that the USN developed quickly (the USN's fighter direction sucked early on, but they learned from their mistakes). During the Guadalcanal campaign, the IJN often had more CVs available than the USN, but the USN was better able to control its forces, which largely neutralized the IJN numerical advantage. And after that, it was just the USN steamroller. Overwhelming quantity, on average considerably better material quality, and seriously better pilot quality. Directors and mounts are indeed critical to AA success. But so are the quantity and quality of the guns. Pretty much all USN wartime ships from DDs up had DP 5"/38s and every square inch of the remaining deck space was covered with highly regarded 40mm or 20mm guns. On anything bigger than a DD, there were multiple directors for the 5" and everybody had multiple directors for 40mm. This is generally recognized as the best AA armament of WW2, and it certainly was against the conventional attacks of the day. But the kamikaze changed that. Now you had utterly to destroy the plane far enough away that sheer momentum wouldn't carry the wreckage into the ship anyway. So the USN decided what it had wasn't good enough and was in the process of changing things to a new standard when WW2 ended. The 5"/38 was going to be replaced by the 5"/54, the quad 40mm by a twin, belt-fed 3"/50, and the 20mm eliminated entirely at a useless waste of manpower. They even developed a 6" DP mount but decided it really wasn't worth having. The 5"/54, however, is still in service today and the twin 3" lasted well into the SAM era. I think your opinions are spot on, and I also agree that it's unlikely that anybody would have developed AAA equipment in advance of existing threats. The AAA outfits that ships entered the war with were scaled to what they though the existing threat was. This usually proved an underestimation, so AAA was increased as much as possible to deal with the existing threat. But as mentioned above, when a new threat arose, even the USN had to start over.
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Post by axe99 on Aug 30, 2016 0:18:42 GMT -6
I definitely agree that it's unlikely that AAA and its supporting systems would be ahead of the aircraft curve, I'm just thinking about there being a possibility for it being the case in-game, and it not being clear when airpower has got to the point where it's clearly top dog, so that when we're playing it, we're faced with the same decisions that leaders had at the time, rather than the "OK, we can build aircraft carriers now, so lets spend all our money building as many as we can" (I know that's an extreme example, but I'm sure you know where I'm coming from). Just some kind of mechanic that means its a matter of judgement where that crossover is. On the Brits and CAPs, while they never had anything like a TF 58 style CAP (because I don't think at any stage in the war the Brits had as many carriers as the US had in that TF), I still think they used them doctrinally in that sense (which is what I'm arguing, rather than "who had the biggest CAP", a question to which there's only one answer , which was why I mentioned it. While they had all sorts of issues, once they got in the air, Seafires look to have been decent close-in CAP fighters, and remained so until it was time to try and land them again (although I'm sure their short endurance meant there was more of the whole taking off and landing thing than for the longer-range US aircraft). Even with the limited aircraft (both in number and capability) on Operation Pedestal, I vaguely remember reading that around ten per cent of the attacking force was destroyed one way or another (I'm going on wobbly memory here though, so am very open to correction), and given the reputation of British AA fire, I'm guessing at least some of those aircraft were taken care of by fighter aircraft from the carriers. Once the British Pacific Fleet was a thing, I'd be very surprised if larger, USN-style CAPs weren't a pretty standard thing, just that no-one, anywhere, was going to match the scale of the USN by about mid-late 1943 (I cant recall exactly when USN forces overtook the Japanese in the Pacific, but I think it was around then). It doesn't mean they didn't have them though - it's a question of doctrine vs scale (and if we start talking scale, then once we get to 1945, we may as well say that there was only one navy ). Edit: Sorry, I've completely shanked the quote system - I agree with a lot of what you've said, although I think it's worth pointing out that the AA of the USN you're describing is more the 1944/45 USN, than the 1941/42 (there were still lots of 5"/38s in 41/42 of course, but nowhere near as much or as good close-in AA).
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Post by marcorossolini on Aug 30, 2016 1:17:09 GMT -6
Frankly, for RTW 2 I'm still holding out for triremes!
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gato
New Member
Posts: 38
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Post by gato on Aug 30, 2016 1:52:04 GMT -6
AA fire is a one of much elements of RTW-2 gameplay, that will be defined. For example: 1. How work aircraft carrier naval formation - distances, screen, support etc. And how work 2 or 3 combined carrier formations, with CV`s in one and CVL`s in other? How work ship AA in 1925-1930/1930-1935/1930-1940/1940-1943/after 1943? 2. How national specialty in AA, in carriers tactics and operational elements? 3. How works aircraft search missions? 4. How works CAP? 5. How works strike missions&loadouts&fighter escorts? 6. How player or AI determines the targets of CAG? 7. How works air wing service, for example time for preparation of strike, time of takeoff, of landing, of mission execution? 8. How works a different types of warplanes?
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Post by bcoopactual on Aug 30, 2016 3:21:26 GMT -6
AA fire is a one of much elements of RTW-2 gameplay, that will be defined. For example: 1. How work aircraft carrier naval formation - distances, screen, support etc. And how work 2 or 3 combined carrier formations, with CV`s in one and CVL`s in other? How work ship AA in 1925-1930/1930-1935/1930-1940/1940-1943/after 1943? 2. How national specialty in AA, in carriers tactics and operational elements? 3. How works aircraft search missions? 4. How works CAP? 5. How works strike missions&loadouts&fighter escorts? 6. How player or AI determines the targets of CAG? 7. How works air wing service, for example time for preparation of strike, time of takeoff, of landing, of mission execution? 8. How works a different types of warplanes? It's kind of funny but all of those things are a significant part of why I'm kind of hoping RTW2 doesn't go past 1936 or so. I was never as interested in the WWI period as I was about WWII but now that I've played RTW, I have really enjoyed the focus on dreadnoughts. Once you reach the late 1930's, everything becomes about carriers. Protecting them, sinking them, building more. But that's me. And it doesn't really matter, I'm almost certain to buy it at this point no matter what period it covers.
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Post by axe99 on Aug 30, 2016 3:59:44 GMT -6
Frankly, for RTW 2 I'm still holding out for triremes! This would require an altogether different take on fire control . I actually would be pretty happy with an 1860 to 1900 kind of take on it as well (not that I'm saying I wouldn't mind a 500 BC to 1900 AD take either ).
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Post by marcorossolini on Aug 30, 2016 4:29:57 GMT -6
Frankly, I don't give a damn where RTW2 goes! (apart from space, got plenty of games like that already)
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Post by bcoopactual on Aug 30, 2016 6:33:22 GMT -6
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