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Post by aeson on Aug 17, 2019 12:11:34 GMT -6
The point is that "belt" armor on a protected cruiser should more closely approximate horizontal than vertical protection. I don't think practice demonstrates the near-immunity to early-game belt hits that that would imply. There's ambiguity in the game as to whether B/BE/D/DE/T/TT represents where a hit occurred or what a hit struck. For example: This ship is a protected cruiser with no turret face (T), turret top (TT), belt extended (BE), or deck extended (DE) armor, and as it is a protected cruiser it should not have a proper armor belt. There are 15 hits against T, 3 hits against TT, 12 hits against B, and 11 hits against BE in the logs, if I've counted correctly.
Given that hits 'struck' T, TT, and BE when the ship has no T, TT, or BE armor, are the hits that reportedly struck B actually hitting B, or are they hitting locations where there would normally be hitting belt armor if the ship had an actual armor belt?
Also, the notional penetration of CL Phaeton's 5" guns exceeds 2" under 7,000 yards and 2.6" at 5,000 yards, and HE shells should notionally have very little ability to penetrate armor. In light of this, it is interesting that there is a 5" AP hit at 3842 yards which failed to penetrate the belt over the Engine Room. It is also interested that there were six hits against Hull B (3" HE @ 3045 yards, 10:27; 5" AP @ 3068, 11:21; 5" AP @ 2343 yards, 11:28; 5" HE @ 1207 yards, 11:58; 3" HE @ 1370 yards, 12:01; 5" HE @ 1267 yards, 12:43), all of which - even the two 3" HE hits - penetrated, but of six Engine Room B hits (5" HE @ 5419 yards, 09:49; 5" AP @ 3842 yards, 10:10; 5" AP @ 2819 yards, 10:32; 5" HE @ 2333 yards, 11:47; 3" HE @ 1207 yards, 11:58; 5" HE @ 3088 yards, 12:16), only the 5" AP @ 2819 yards penetrated.
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Post by aeson on Aug 17, 2019 9:38:59 GMT -6
No, I got 102 DDs and only two sea zones to cover. How many of your DDs are assigned to the Active Fleet (AF), and are the ships assigned to AF in the sea zone where the engagements are occurring?
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Post by aeson on Aug 17, 2019 9:36:02 GMT -6
'Hidden flaws,' if I recall correctly, manifests as an increased risk of turret flashfires.
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Post by aeson on Aug 17, 2019 7:24:08 GMT -6
in fact i don't use any armour on my carriers to get the best possible speed out of them and to make them cheaper - except for 1" belt/deck on my first CV of course, since you can't install 8" guns on a ship with no armour If you keep your first carrier at 20,000 tons or less, you can use 6" guns to satisfy the armament requirement for the first carrier.
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Post by aeson on Aug 16, 2019 20:52:46 GMT -6
If you get a blockade then I want one, too! Oh, wait, I already have one...
Also ... ... Ow. I don't know whether to call it spectacularly lucky or exceptional shooting, but four (of twelve total) main battery guns knocked out in the space of a minute, plus some harm to the secondaries? I'd say armor the guns, but even in 1903 it's probably not reasonable for a 3,100t cruiser to put enough armor on a 4" main battery to protect against 5" AP at 3183 yards.
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Post by aeson on Aug 16, 2019 20:32:35 GMT -6
Not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that they get more than 2" protection against belt hits out of the 2" belt? The point is that "belt" armor on a protected cruiser should more closely approximate horizontal than vertical protection.
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Post by aeson on Aug 16, 2019 18:27:33 GMT -6
1) I researched deck park, but I don’t know what it does. When I designed a new carrier clicked on “Deck Park”, but none of the numbers changed. Deck Parks do not currently do anything.
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Post by aeson on Aug 16, 2019 16:19:27 GMT -6
I see lots of protected cruisers with 1.5 or 2" belt armor, and more than 2.5 is relatively rare. Even start-of-game 6" AP can penetrate that at substantial range. Not sure about 1900 5". (Legacy fleet being legacy fleet, you may also find your secondary battery is bigger, or in bizarre cases smaller. My current game has a legacy cruiser that came with a 2" secondary battery.) 'Belt' armor on a protected cruiser represents the sloping outer portion of the armor deck, not an actual armor belt. Your secondaries can be within range without being within effective range, especially when your main battery has a good fire control system and your secondary battery has nothing.
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Post by aeson on Aug 15, 2019 18:54:13 GMT -6
For shore bombardment, it all depends on if the target is fortified, or a soft target in the open. I don't know which of those bombardment targets in-game are supposed to represent. The template file for the generic bombardment target indicates a half inch of vertical and no horizontal armor, so I'd be inclined to say it represents a soft target.
Coastal batteries: 4", 5", 6", 7": 4"/2" bunker + 2"/1" on the guns. 8", 9": 5"/2" bunker + 2"/1" on the guns. 10": 6"/2" bunker + 2"/1" on the guns. 11", 12": 8"/2" bunker + 2"/1" on the guns. Turreted 12", 13", 14": 16"/5" bunker + 15"/5" on the gun turrets.
Airbases and airship bases have 2"/1" on the main guns but no other armor. Debatable; once you have Directors or maybe even Central Firing, the effective range of typical CA/B/BC/BB main battery guns starts to significantly exceed the effective range of 5" or 6" guns - all the more so if your ships lack secondary directors, since then the secondary battery is assumed to be under local control - and getting in close enough for 6" or lighter AP to be effective becomes unnecessary (and, in view of the increasing range and power of torpedoes in the same period, probably undesirable). If you're using 4" secondary guns, AP probably wasn't going to penetrate any reasonable level of armor protection at any reasonable engagement range anyways.
There's also that all early-game CLs are protected cruisers, and given the typical listed armor thicknesses probably the only thing on them that 5" or 6" AP should really be effective against are the turrets and conning tower - the rest of the ship should either be more or less unarmored or protected by a sloping armor deck that's too thick for it to be likely that a light AP shell would penetrate it at reasonable engagement ranges.
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Post by aeson on Aug 15, 2019 17:50:33 GMT -6
Are cheap colonial cruisers better than cheap colonial KE gunboats? Depends on what you want. A cheap colonial gunboat KE probably has the highest effective station tonnage per unit cost (construction or maintenance) and can provide minesweeping and ASW capability, but KEs appear to be ignored when calculating fleet strength. A cheap colonial cruiser counts towards fleet strength on station and can act as a surface raider or counter enemy surface raiders, but probably costs more per unit of station tonnage and does not provide any significant minesweeping or ASW capability.
Personally, I prefer to go with a mix of both.
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Post by aeson on Aug 15, 2019 0:38:53 GMT -6
I don't particularly object to allowing larger DDs in the late game, but I'm not sure I see the point - as far as I am aware, ASW ratings are irrelevant for ships that are not assigned to Trade Protection, and I very much doubt if big DDs would be built specifically for that role unless they were considerably more capable ASW units than smaller, less expensive alternatives, so I don't really see what they'd bring that cannot currently be done using a smallish CL with token armor protection. I expect that it would be possible as something along those lines is already in place for CLs, with maximum permissible displacement increasing to 10,000 tons in the 1930s and 12,000 tons in the 1940s. As to whether or not it's desirable, I have no strong feelings on that, but as I indicated above I don't really see the point of it within the game.
I don't see a reason to add a TP/ASW tag to designs - you can already keep TP/ASW ships mostly out of combat by assigning them to Trade Protection in wartime and Reserve Fleet or Mothballs in peacetime, and you can skip the one-interturn window between WU and auto-assignment to AF by assigning new TP/ASW ships to Trade Protection the turn before the game announces that they've finished working up - their crew quality is already 'Fair' by that point anyways, so it's probably not much if any worse than waiting out the full working-up period, and if you're willing to use them while their crew quality is still 'Poor' you can do it directly after commissioning so as to be less likely to wait a turn or two and forget about them.
As to the idea of specific "surface" and "AA" tags, I'm a bit leery of that. Firstly, the dichotomy chosen is weird - why "AA" and "surface" when "surface" is almost meaninglessly generic while "AA" is overly-specific? Probably the only categories of ships that wouldn't reasonably fall under "surface" are AVs, CVLs, and CVs that lack access to bomb- or torpedo-equipped aircraft, specialized low-cost minesweepers and ASW craft, and maybe some very minimal examples of third class and auxiliary cruisers; meanwhile, fleet AA escort cruisers are probably extremely similar in size, armament, and intended usage to the fleet anti-DD escort cruisers seemingly excluded by the "AA" designation, and probably aren't that dissimilar in size or design to non-minimal light fleet scouts or light colonial/trade protection cruisers that don't really want to be drawn for independent operation against heavier units any more than the fleet AA escorts do. Additionally, while I definitely prefer 6" guns to 5" guns for use against cruisers, 5" CLs along the lines of an Atlanta are a long ways from being what I'd call bad against similarly-large 6" CLs.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the main historical CLAAs - the Atlanta/Oakland and Dido classes - weren't really intended to be fleet AA escorts. They were primarily designed to be flotilla leaders, distant scouts, and trade protection cruisers on relatively low displacements while AA capability was more of a secondary concern. There may have been a growing recognition of aviation's potential to unseat the battleship as sovereign of the seas, but these ships were designed and laid down while the Big Gun was still generally thought to be dominant and alert (heavy) warships at sea considered largely immune to air attack. I don't feel that Weapon Alpha and similar systems merit inclusion as separate systems, though they could perhaps be included as a tech to further increase the effectiveness of the ASW mortar.
As to ASROC, it's probably not as far outside the game's timeframe as you might think - RUR-5 was in development in the '50s and was in service in 1960.
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Post by aeson on Aug 14, 2019 11:37:48 GMT -6
- Create the design you want in a save file that has the technology to do it (1900 start with auto-generated legacy fleet and modified tech in the game file, for example). - If the design has not completed the 'Design Study' phase, find the design in the save file, open it with a text editor, and change 'Ready=0' to 'Ready=1.' - Optionally copy the design to somewhere that you can find it easily and won't accidentally overwrite/delete it (e.g. desktop). - Create a new game with the option to manually build the legacy fleet set. Note - if you did not copy the design to some other location, do not overwrite the save file in which you created the design. - Copy the design into the save folder for your new game while the game is running, without exiting the legacy construction phase; if necessary, change the file extension to the appropriate extension for that save game (file extension for a player ship design should be *.#0d, where # is the Arabic numeral corresponding to the save slot; e.g. in slot 4 a player ship design is *.40d).
You should now be able to build the design as long as it fits within an available dock size. If you cannot build ships of the appropriate size domestically but can do so overseas, open the design file, look for BuildingNation=0, and change the number after the equal sign to the number corresponding to a power which can build ships of that size. If no power in the game has a dock large enough to build the ship that you want, you'll either have to make the ship smaller, mod a power's nation definition to give it a sufficiently-large initial dock size for what you want to build prior to starting a new game, or edit the ship into the save state manually.
Building nation numbers are in the order shown below, with the actual nation represented by the number being whichever power has its flag in that position under the 'Tension levels' graph in the main game window in your game:
Example: Note that some technologies can cause problems when you try to refit a design that uses them prior to developing them yourself:
You can also use this method to build normally-illegal designs (e.g. an unarmored cruiser or a very large armored destroyer) if you edit the design file to have the statistics that you want, but be aware that it is likely that the game will not let you use the in-game designer to create the refit designs or may try to force a reclassification as part of the refit.
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Post by aeson on Aug 14, 2019 10:52:13 GMT -6
Game settings: Very Large Fleets, Historical Budget, 1900 start, manual build of legacy fleet.
Legacy fleet overview: Mediterranean Station: Diadem, Niobe (Diadem class), Arethusa, Carysfort (Arethusa class), four colonial gunboats. West Africa Station: Four colonial gunboats. India and East Africa Station: Argonaut (Diadem class), Champion (Champion class), four colonial gunboats. East Indies Station: Europa (Diadem class), Conquest (Champion class), four colonial gunboats. China Station: Curacoa (Curacoa class), four colonial gunboats. American North Atlantic Station: Andromeda (Diadem class), four colonial gunboats. West Indies Station: Comus (Curacoa class), four colonial gunboats. American North Pacific Station: Four colonial gunboats. American South Atlantic Station: Four colonial gunboats. South Pacific Station: Cleopatra (Cleopatra class), four colonial gunboats. South Africa Station: Amphitrite (Diadem class), Canada (Champion class), four colonial gunboats.
All other ships are currently based out of Britain and Ireland.
The colonial gunboats and all cruisers are fitted for colonial service, and the colonial gunboats are additionally fitted for minesweeping.
The legacy construction program consists of two Ariadne-class first class cruisers (Cressy and Aboukir), six Leander-class second class cruisers (Phoenix, Pelorus, Pandora, Psyche, Amphion, and Persian), and eight harbor minesweepers of the Maizar class are due to complete in 1900 to supplement the twelve Howe-class battleships, two Ariadne-class cruisers, six Leander-class cruisers, and sixteen Maizar-class harbor minesweepers already in service with the Home Fleet. No battleships are under construction as I do not feel a strong need to expand the battle line, and anyways I'd rather lay down battleships to an improved design than additional ships of the Howe class.
Foreign legacy fleets: Battleships: The Italian Napoli and Japanese Yashima classes are probably the best of the legacy battleships, though Yashima's 8x2x6" secondary battery might give it some trouble, and while gun penetration remains poor neither of these is likely to be significantly better than any of the other legacy battleships except the French Ocean class, which has a bit of an awkward main battery, and the German Wittelsbach class, which is probably okay right now but will likely age poorly due to its 10" main battery despite the heavy belt armor.
Nothing here seems particularly better than my Howe-class battleships.
First Class Cruisers: The Russian Pamyat Azova class is probably the best of the larger type of first class cruisers, being fast (23 knots), heavily armored (6" belt), and reasonably well armed (2x2x9" + 14x1x6" casemated), but otherwise none of these really stand out as better than the others.
I'm slightly concerned about my Diadem class since it's a bit of an experiment - I normally use 2x2x9" or 2x2x10" for legacy CAs above ~9,000 tons or a bunch of heavily-armored 6" guns if I build a smaller CA - and I'm a little worried that its 6x2x7" main battery will be plagued by turret troubles and that its armor might be a bit too thin, but on the plus side none of the foreign ~10,000t CAs look like they should really be all that much better.
Second Class Cruisers: Germany's Freya is interesting - it's a CA, technically, though it's a bit poorly armed for its size and its main battery will suffer from reliability issues. If the turrets are adequately armored, it's potentially a bit of a nightmare for one of my CLs but would probably be overmatched against two and should be easily overpowered by any one of my CAs.
Russia's Rynda is the only class with no units in service at the start of the game, but if I had to guess I'd say it's probably a repeat of the Novik class, or maybe a variant that gives up some of the tertiary guns for armor protection on the main battery.
Nothing else really noteworthy.
Third Class Cruisers: The Bari/Olympia/Vladimir type will probably be a nightmare for destroyers and they have enough guns that there might be some risk of my 5" and 6" cruisers losing out to volume of fire, but they should also lose guns fairly quickly since at least the main battery, and most likely also the secondary battery, is unarmored, and my heavier CLs are armored well enough that they probably don't have that much to fear from 4" guns aside from fire and critical hits.
Torpedo Boats and Torpedo Boat Destroyers: Nothing in particular stands out, other than that it appears as though only three templates were used and most powers picked the same two (the 400t TBD and the 500t TB).
Fleet Bases and Other Infrastructure: As is probably normal for most players, I have ordered an expansion of British docks to begin January 1900. Additionally, improvements to the base facilities at Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, and Weihaiwei were ordered begun in January 1900, and I have begun the process of constructing a single 4" battery in every colony as a token defensive investment, with intent to more heavily fortify Weihaiwei and possibly Hong Kong and Singapore in the future, though as tensions with Japan in January 1900 are very low (1) and I'm unlikely to try to provoke a war with them that's a low priority.
Expansion of the bases on the North American East Coast and in the Caribbean is planned for the future and should perhaps have been prioritized over expansion of the Mediterranean bases since the initial tensions were highest with the USA (4) and the Mediterranean bases were already adequate for what I'd need to fight Italy.
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Post by aeson on Aug 7, 2019 14:44:12 GMT -6
Yeah, I know that. But it is a battleship, it has armored cruiser scheme, not protected cruiser. I doubt that the shell penetrated the upper deck. And if it didnt, then there is no way for splinters to penetrate 2 decks - upper deck first and then the main citadel armor. At 6,840 yards I'd be somewhat surprised if the shell trajectory would allow a 6" shell to hit both the upper (splinter) and the lower (main) armor decks; seems more likely to me that this is a hit that somehow or other found a path to the main armor deck that bypassed other parts of the ship's armor.
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Post by aeson on Aug 7, 2019 14:33:23 GMT -6
I only skimmed through the bottom/latest comments, but what I would say is this: I have definitely had too many "two turrets damaged/destroyed by same hit" events. It's very neat that this can happen (bravo!). It seems that it should not be happening multiple times in a battle or even in a high frequency of battles. I'm sure there is a historical precedence for this, but it's rare enough that skin-deep naval historians like myself do not know of it. SMS Seydlitz lost both of its after turrets to a shell that struck the rearmost barbette and detonated powder charges inside of it at the Battle of the Dogger Bank (24 January 1915).
Edit: Also, regarding the effect of range on turret hits, note that turrets may well appear larger to high-trajectory shells than to low-trajectory shells, because the turret top starts to become visible and the turret top is a much larger surface than the turret face. A turret's projection into plane normal to the shell trajectory will become larger as the shell trajectory gets higher, at least up to a certain point, as can be seen in the above images of the battleship Richelieu.
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