Damage Modelling

[pcasey]

In the game your ships get hit by things.

Shells, Bombs, Torpedoes.

Those things, in turn, do damage to your ship.

Your ship, in turn, resists that damage.

Armor can prevent any material harm from many hits.

Hits which penetrate your armor though, in turn, can have a variety of effects.

Structure -- They can damage your structure
Floatation --- They can damage your floatation
Turrets -- They can disable (or destroy) a turret
Engines -- They can slow your ship down
Random special stuff --- Rudder Jammed left, magazine explosion, electrical power out, etc

I'm hoping somebody can answer some questions here to help me understand the underlying damage model and how it relates to the first two damage types (Structure & Floatation).

Structure Damage ---

1) What does it actually *do*? Observationally I can literally destroy all the structure on a ship and it'll keep moving, floating, and firing its guns so its not clear what impact piling up all that structure damage has.

2) Is it safe to assume bigger ships have more structure, and hence can take more punishment before being destroyed? If so, how much? Is there a way to quantify this?

Floatation ---

1) Just like structure, *how much* floatation does it take to sink my ship? Do bigger ships have more reserve buoyancy and hence the ability to take more floatation damage than a smaller ship (would make sense but that doesn't mean the game implemented things that way). Is there a way for me to see, in game, what my reserve bouyancy/resistance to floatation damage is?

2) Do any of my design choices like reduced freeboard impact my reserve bouyancy, or is it just a function of the size of the ship?

[brotherpedro]

You can right click your ship and mouse over the structure and flotation damage bar to see the exact number of basically HP your ship has.

Heavy structure damage gives severe accuracy penalty (I think up to -50) and probably other penalties. Losing all flotation points will sink the ship.

[garrisonchisholm]

As far as damage modeling, I think if you keep a careful eye on where the bombs & shells fall on your carriers you will notice a surprising dearth of Flight Deck hits, which one would think should be A#1 just by random chance. This is known, and is on the list of needing to be worked on.

As are as buoyancy, yes, Flotation is affected by design choices, as well as which of three stages of "overweight" might be present by design or mischance.

Structure cannot really be "tailored" by design choices, it is dependent upon ship size.

[director]

pcasey - as I understand it, structure refers to the parts of the ship above the waterline and flotation to the parts beneath. Massive structure damage would wreck the gunnery directors and/or fire control as well as disrupting command and communications.

I think you are correct in assuming that big ships have more structure and flotation points. The only way to measure that would be to hit a DD with one shall and then hit a BB with the exact same caliber. Allowing for randomization, you would see that a hit would 'likely' affect a DD more than a BB. I'm sure the game has numbers for shell type and size, and for each ship design, as well as ways to allow for where the shell hits, whether or not it penetrates, etc. If the answer you are looking for is, say, the number of 5" hits it takes to sink a battleship, the answer is a function returning a number between 1 and many.

I've never experimented with reduced freeboard, but - given the examples of submarines and the Great Lakes whalebacks - I'd have to say that flotation is not directly coupled to freeboard but buoyancy.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaleback

[bcoopactual]

If your last structural points are lost due to an active fire on board the ship is forced to be abandoned.  You will see a message in the ship's log (ship abandoned due to uncontrollable fires) to that effect.  The result is the same as if the ship sank.  There is no mechanism in-game for reboarding the ship as happened with USS Yorktown at Midway.  USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Hornet (CV-8) as well as Akagi, Kaga and Soryu are all good examples as well.  Ships that had to be abandoned but did not have enough damage/flooding below the waterline to sink the ship outright.  You don't have to actually launch torpedoes in-game to scuttle those ships affected, I presume it is assumed to happen off-screen after the scenario ends.   


I'm not sure if the ship has to be abandoned if all structural points are lost due to gunfire but no fires are active on board.  Not sure how likely that is to happen either.