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Post by ccip on Sept 27, 2016 21:54:04 GMT -6
Well, i wouldn't totally write it off, especially with things like variable tech playing a role, you do want to leave some space there for it to potentially work. As long as it doesn't lead into the dreaded (or pre-dreaded/semi-dreaded, in our case? ) problem of Misaimed Realism (http://tvtropes.org/Main/MisaimedRealism). Also out of curiosity: did anyone in the armored gunship era ever develop a fire control system that coordinated fire between ships? (E.g. formation lead does all the ranging, the others simply adjust for position and fire timed salvos on the leader's target) That would be an interesting one!
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Post by director on Sept 27, 2016 22:57:20 GMT -6
The closest thing I know of to that would be the big range 'clocks' fitted to each ship's masts in the inter-war period. That way ships ahead (and I suppose behind) could see your estimate of the range.
Gunnery depends on a lot of factors, and a lot of those differ slightly from ship to ship. Without digital transmission of data I don;t know how you would transmit enough data fast enough to be helpful.
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Post by bcoopactual on Sept 28, 2016 0:31:18 GMT -6
Some navies also painted markings on their turrets allowing other ships to see the bearing (off of the ship's centerline) they were pointed at. It seemed to be of limited use because I don't think that practice continued for a long time. Perhaps it was intended to allow coordination when mist, fog or smoke partially obscured the battlefield. Not the best picture to demonstrate but you can see the black bands with white hash-marks and numbers painted on the bases of the forward and aft superfiring turrets.
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Post by Bullethead on Oct 1, 2016 17:21:25 GMT -6
This quote is from a book, written in 1905 by Fred T. Jane about the IJN. It appears that even in 1905, there was a modicum of centralized gun direction. It was not sophisticated but it was centralized. Yeah, each gun got the range from a master rangefinder. Everybody pretty much was doing this by this point in time. As Jane says, without such a system, a rangefinder wasn't much use. However, such a system could work with a mixed battery because all it transmitted was the range (the present range, not the future range). Then each gun manually set its elevation for that range depending on its own range tables based on its own ballistics. Such systems didn't work well for anything but parallel steaming broadside on, and didn't have much say about deflection. However, the ranges were short enough back then that this wasn't too much of a problem. But with director systems, the system passed not the present range but the specific elevation and deflection settings needed by the guns to hit the target in the future. Such output was only possible because the computer took the ballistics of the guns into account. See, the computer was using its derived estimate of target course and speed to predict its future line of travel, then aimed the guns at a point along that line when the shells and the target would get there simultaneously based on the time of flight of the shells. And the time of flight of the shells was dependent on the ballistics of the guns involved. So, the computer had to have the ballistics of the gun stored in it. But it was an analog device, so the ballistics were "hard-coded" into it in the form of gears and cams of specific sizes and shapes. This meant that a single computer could only work with 1 specific type of gun and could not work for multiple calibers. If you had multiple calibers, you had to have a separate computer for each. If you didn't spring for multiple computers, then only 1 battery could have director control and the others had to use something less fancy. This remained the case until well after WW2 because analog computers lasted that long. ccipAs for radar, that was just a refinement of the existing director system, not an entirely new system. For all navies for most of the war, radar was nothing but a very precise rangefinder. Range being much harder to get right (especially at longer ranges) than deflection, this was a big help indeed. However, the radar range was simply plugged into the same analog computer already there for the visual system, and that computer could still only control 1 size of gun. For some navies, especially later in the war, radar could also be used for more precise spotting of splashes. But again that just took some of the error out of the initial measurement. The spotting corrections for radar were fed into the computer the same way as visual spotting corrections.
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Post by Bullethead on Oct 1, 2016 17:58:12 GMT -6
Also out of curiosity: did anyone in the armored gunship era ever develop a fire control system that coordinated fire between ships? (E.g. formation lead does all the ranging, the others simply adjust for position and fire timed salvos on the leader's target) That would be an interesting one! Yes. This was, in fact, universal practice from the end of WW1 up until the end of the battleship era. The methods for doing this changed considerably as time went on, but the idea of concentrated fire to quickly disable the enemy flagships never went away once it was 1st demonstrated to be possible. As others have mentioned, range clocks in the masts and deflection scales on turrets were quite popular in the initial systems. When short-range voice radio appeared shortly before WW2, the range clocks went away. The 1st concentration system, however, seems to have been invented by the Imperial Russian Black Sea Fleet prior to WW1. This happened because the Turks were going to get dreadnoughts from England several years before the Black Sea Fleet got any. Thus, the Russian system was intended as a stop-gap, to allow its pre-dreadnoughts to fight dreadnoughts on more even terms. It was based on divisions of 3 pre-dreadnoughts, the central one being the "master" ship. This ship was festooned with cumbersome radio antennae to pass data quickly to the other 2 ships. It seemed to work fairly well in testing but of course had a number of limitations, such as vulnerability of the radio antenna and only working when the 3 ships were steaming straight ahead. As things turned out, the Brits seized the Turkish dreadnoughts so the system was actually used against Goeben instead. At the Battle of Cape Sarych, the circumstances meant the system didn't work. The opposing forces spotted each other at short range and nearly head-on, with the Russians in the process of making a turn. The Russian flagship blocked the LOS for the master ship and the system wouldn't have been effective until the Russians finished their turn anyway. But Goeben ran away before these issues could be resolved. I don't believe the system ever got another chance.
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Post by ccip on Oct 1, 2016 20:05:50 GMT -6
Very neat, thanks for the info as always Bullethead! That's definitely a piece of history I did not know and would not have expected to be invented before WWI - but as a way to compensate for pre-dreadnought limitations, that's definitely a pretty interesting invention. I would've expected it to be spurred more by problems of effective spotting and division of targets in larger fleets - Goeben definitely wouldn't have been the ideal target for it! And as far as radar, I understand! I was talking about that strictly from the point of view of game logic, where everything boils down to performance modifiers for each battery that's firing - and in that sense, even if using the same director, firing on radar targets means that the system can throw out pretty much all the visual factors and only work with the radar modifiers (which will be separate). Even if things like wind or accumulated smoke in battle area affect radar, it's not in the same way as Mk1 eyeball, so that'll be a separate system feeding the same battery's dice roll modifiers. They'll still share modifiers for director tech and crew quality, etc. Pretty sure that's not actually that hard from the point of view of SAI/RTW, just as it wouldn't be too huge of an issue for a battery to pick up its fire control modifiers from another battery or another ship if it had to - just needs to be done cleverly and realistically enough! One of SAI/RTW's great virtues is how computationally simple the system is - and the more it can stay that way, the better! It's what allows it to stay focused on levels above tactical, which is where it does the really unique stuff That's why, going forward, I hope new post-WWI tech like radar, spotter aircraft, and whatever else, don't muddy the gunnery calculations picture too much.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Oct 1, 2016 21:33:34 GMT -6
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Post by Bullethead on Oct 1, 2016 23:23:53 GMT -6
And as far as radar, I understand! I was talking about that strictly from the point of view of game logic, where everything boils down to performance modifiers for each battery that's firing - and in that sense, even if using the same director, firing on radar targets means that the system can throw out pretty much all the visual factors and only work with the radar modifiers (which will be separate). Even if things like wind or accumulated smoke in battle area affect radar, it's not in the same way as Mk1 eyeball, so that'll be a separate system feeding the same battery's dice roll modifiers. They'll still share modifiers for director tech and crew quality, etc. Well, if RTW uses the typical wargame "base accuracy + situational modifiers" system instead of trying to model the actual fire control process, then adding radar to this shouldn't be much of a problem. Just add a substantial accuracy bonus due to have a much more accurate range than you could get with optics. But fire control radar was really just a rangefinder. You still had to see the target first before you could shoot at it, and surface search radar was developed after fire control. So, if all you had was fire control radar, you were still pretty much stymied by darkness and smoke. It was possible to do some very limited searching with the fire control radar by panning the director it was attached to slowly across the expected direction of the enemy, but that didn't give enough resolution in bearing to shoot at. You still had to acquire the target visually to get the bearing, so all you could do with this was know you were looking in the right general direction and then wait for the target to loom out of the dark. But bearing resolution was also a problem with early search radars because targets appeared as such big blips. It took fairly advanced, late-war radars (both search and fire control) to be accurate enough for blind firing, including spotting splashes. So, in general, I see radar in RTW2 working like this: - If you have only early fire control radar, you just get a nice accuracy bonus for precise range measurement when shooting, but you'd still use visual spotting of splashes. Also, you would have to see the target visually to be able to shoot. You MIGHT also get some vague, imprecise hints of where the enemy is before you can see him, sort of like reports when the enemy is shelling your coastal installations, but nothing more on ships you can't see.
- If you have early search radar, you should be able to see actual large enemy ships moving around normally well beyond visual range, but small ships would only appear at closer ranges. There should be no problem maintaining contact with ships you can see, provided you're fast enough to keep up with them.
- If you have advanced fire control radar, you should get an additional accuracy bonus for precise spotting of shell splashes.
- If you have advanced search radar, you should be able to see small ships at fairly long range.
- If you have both advanced search and advanced fire control radar, you should be able to do blind firing about as well as shooting in daylight.
Thus, I only see 2 actual shooting modifiers based on the quality of fire control radar. Most of the combat system would remain as before. The main change would be the ability to see through smoke and darkness with search radar, but that only aids maneuvering by itself. You need advanced models of both for blind firing.
Also note that fire control radar was generally tied to a specific gun director, so at most could affect only he battery that director belonged to. So, just because your main battery could get a bonus or even blind fire doesn't mean the secondary batteries could as well.
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