Post by yemo on Jun 6, 2019 10:03:45 GMT -6
After taking over command of the french navy in 1920, the situation is worse than expected.
Radical action has to be taken to save the navy and France itself in the face of incompetence and neglect at home and overwhelming opposition abroad!
I therefore call upon a committee to tackle this crisis. Everyone is welcome to join and work in the interest of France!
Having previously seen the work of dorn , aeson , noshurviverse , MateDow and janxol (RTW1 Royal Navy AAR), I extend a special invitation for counsel.
How we got here (French Succession AAR): nws-online.proboards.com/thread/2671/adrmirals-france-aar-succession
edit: The savegame download (without pictures or autosave):
Game9-FranceSuccession2020noPictures.7z (801.28 KB)
edit2: Now with emoticons ...
A glimpse at the almanac is enough to send cold shivers down the spine.
The naval budget seems to be fine, GreatBritain is unassailably at the front, with the US following and France and Germany competing for third place. Austria, Japan and Italy are trailing behind.
BB numbers seem to reflect that order.
But there seems to be something wrong with the BCs. With just 2 BCs, France is far behind, fielding not even half the tonnage of any other nation. And her two lone BCs seem to be pretty small as well.
Where is all the money going when we have not even half the BCs of a nation with half our budget?
Well, it seems that we are the only nation still having pre-Dreadnoughts in 1920... (or the buggy game just does not show some preDreads in refit)
And not just one, 7! of the old Bs are still around. But wait, it gets even more incredible.
We still have 5 armored cruisers around, while only the US, with their abundance of money, has more than one. And lo and behold, we are even building a new one!!!
The fact that we maintain 25 CLs, while Britain has only 10, is the icing on the cake.
After all that, we hardly recognize the 19 KEs, displacing 1000 tons each.
Maybe we can submerge one of them to have at least an honorary submarine...
Naval aircraft seem to become a thing, for everyone except us.
At least we have the most airships.
A glimpse of an idea comes to mind. Maybe we can avoid battle and use our massive cruiser advantage to blockade and harass potential enemies.
Surely at least some of those cruisers are fast enough for that mission while our 2 BCs keep enemy BCs at bay...
Time to take a look at our more detailed ship roster.
While the staff feared a heart attack, our fears go much further, after taking a glance at our ship roster.
We do not have a single BC! In 1920!
Sure, there are two ships with the BC acronym scribbled beside their name, but that has to either be a mistake, or more likely some scheme to lie to the public about the state of our navy!
23 knot BCs and, no, that can not be true, an "a" is the ancient marker for cramped accomodations, that has to be a mistake...
I was mentally prepared for the pre-Dreads, so the cruisers have to bear the brunt of the fighting. Without BCs, not an easy task.
But what is that? Not one cruiser faster than 25 knots! In 1920, when the newest foreign BCs are rumoured to go 30 knots or more...
And new foreign CLs are in the 29 knot range...
Which is faster than our fastest DD in service. Not even a single one of our DDs can run away from a modern enemy BC or CL!!!!
And then there are the 1000 ton KEs which are pretty maintenance intensive, since all of them are stationed abroad, leaving no minesweeping capabilities in home waters.
Most of our fleet never had a fresh paint job in their whole career, let alone a proper refit. They are slowly fading away on their own.
For comparision, a quick glance at the British and Austrian fleets (since we have high tensions with Austria and Britain is the technology leader).
For Austria: BC Arpad class 25knots, BC Slavonien class 28knots, BC Kärnten and BC Vorarlberg classes both 27knots (game still bugged and showing wrong speeds).
They have about half our budget, but we have nothing to keep their BCs in check. Sure, we have bigger guns and many more cruisers, but non of our ships can catch them if they do not want to engage us.
Yet they can easily catch every one of our ships...
So lets take a more detailed look at our ships and what we have under construction.
The two positive things first, because we need some good news to avoid an actual heart attack:
1) We are converting a light cruiser into an experimental light aircraft carrier.
2) We are building three new, modern DDs.
And now the bad stuff:
3) That huge Napoleon class is a 1914?! design and not even half finished in January 1920...
4) We are building another CA, which sadly is 2/3 finished. But with a speed of 25 knots, we can not think of a mission for it, except mopping up ancient cruisers before they are retired or die of old age.
A closer look at the more important ships in our fleet:
The CVL under conversion is very small, but at least we gain valuable experience with this new concept for a pretty low price.
And it seems to be ready in two months. Everyone is excited to see what it can do.
The Ocean class. 10 years old and in need of a refit. A proper design for its time, but a bit light on the belt and especially turret armor.
Napoleon class. At first glance an ok 1914 design, at second glance the narrow belt, 12'' quadruple turret armor and holy cow 180 shells per 15'' gun are a surprise.
And why the hell is there still a halfway built ship of that design under construction in 1920?
The fake BC Austerlitz class. It should be reclassified as a dreadnought. Finished in 1914 (so I assume it is a ~1911 design), it has an overabundance of shells per gun and an even more questionable armor scheme.
The 10'' secondaries are protected by 4'' of armor. We thus recommend every friendly ship to keep their distance and be prepared for the fireworks when an enemy shoots at her.
Magenta, Redoutable and Marengo class Bs share a lot of characteristica. So we only look at one of them, the Marengo class. All have a narrow belt with 10'' - 10.5'' of belt armor and 1.5'' of deck armor.
Magenta and Redoutable have 12/-1 guns with central rangefinding, Marengo uses 13/-2 guns with central firing. Magenta also uses a funny 4x1 gun turret layout for a broadside of 3 guns.
B Duquesne is a semi-Dreadnought. With the other Dreadnoughts in mind, she was our most capable ship for a time and we can still see her appeal. The 22 knots were outstanding at the time and would make her a prime candidate to convert into a CVL. Unfortunately our designers and shipyard workers adamantly refuse to convert any ship over 16000 tons without giving a reason... A real shame.