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Post by thefleetofoceans on Mar 30, 2021 7:28:21 GMT -6
That's gonna be a straight 1 for me. The design itself is solid with only one change needed swap the dual 8in for dual 6in for a uniform battery of guns and perhaps a another knot of speed. This then gives a decent armed fast protected cruiser that can destroy pretty much any protected cruiser it'll meet and has upgrade potential well into the 1920's until CL's with heavier armour and more guns come onto the scene.
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Post by aeson on Mar 30, 2021 8:23:46 GMT -6
The vast majority of engagements in a war are cruiser engagements in one form or another. Question: Why would I add, say, 6 to 8 CL to my fleet and run the risk of losing at least some of them every war when I can build two additional CA and be almost guaranteed victory in that majority of engagements? Because, barring misfortune, I'm already confident of winning the overwhelming majority of cruiser engagements using CLs. Why should I build a big expensive ship that's more of a loss if something goes wrong when I already have significant confidence in my ability to win cruiser engagements with a much cheaper ship, especially considering that that cheaper ship is a much, much better ship to use for screening capital ships than a larger cruiser that costs almost as much as the ships it's supposed to be protecting? It's 1911, and battlecruisers are already around.
Also, in a supporting role big expensive CAs are garbage, because big expensive CAs are a very inefficient way of providing anti-destroyer/anti-aircraft escorts to capital ships, don't carry sufficiently-heavy guns to punch holes in capital ship armor at reasonable engagement ranges, can't practically be armored well enough to stand up to capital ship guns despite being nearly as expensive as a capital ship, can't cover multiple threat vectors very well because you can't afford to have nearly as many of them to accompany your capital ships, and are nearly as worthwhile a target for a destroyer's torpedoes or for an airstrike as a full capital ship is because it's almost as expensive as one. The only thing CAs are theoretically better at than CLs is bullying cruisers, but since I'm already confident in my ability to defeat opposing cruisers - including the computer's CAs - with my CLs I cannot say that I see much allure to CAs for that purpose.
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Post by hawkeye on Mar 30, 2021 9:14:55 GMT -6
Below are the results of the three games I still have saves of:
Germany game, super large fleet, 50% RR, it's 1940, never build a single CL - multiple wars with France and Russia --> I lost 1 B, 1 AV and a ton of DDs and KEs but not a single CA lost. -French losses: 2 BB + 5 BC + 18 B + 18 CA + 13 CL + tons of DDs -Russian losses: 4 BB + 16 BC + 17 CA + 13 CL + tons of DDs
Germany game, super large fleet, 50% RR, it's 1923, never build a single CL, one war with France, three with Russia --> I lost 2 CA, one to a flashfire one to a mine and a ton of DDs and KEs. -French losses: 12 BB + 12 BC + 6 B + 10 CA + 9 CL + 22 DD + some KE -Russian losses: 14 B + 22 CA + 19 CL + 26 DD
Germany game, medium fleet, 30% RR, it's 1908, never build a single CL, one war with Russia, currently in the early war (4th month) with Italy --> I lost 12 DD -French losses: 8 B + 6 CA + 7 CL + 13 DD + some KE -Italian losses: 3 B + 3 CA + 5 DD
Didn't realize my CAs weren't supposed to screen my capital ships.
I rest my case.
Anyway, I don't think this discussion leads to anything, so let's just agree to disagree.
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Post by faustzwei on Apr 2, 2021 10:11:15 GMT -6
Hmmmm I am torn.
I really like the design in the way of "stronger than anything faster, faster than anything stronger". But then again, Lissa's design speed is already 28 knots and potential enemies might be not too far off with their second generation battlecruisers. And Kaiser beware, if they finish a knot below their designed speed, then meeting any BC is likely their end.
So I probably would base it on a forecast of a likely future enemy and their capabilities in the BC department; if they already have BCs of that speed and are expected to churn out even more, then it's a dangerous gamble. If they are thought to not amass BCs soon (Italy?), these ships might be valuable assets!
Careful 3 from me.
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Post by rimbecano on Apr 3, 2021 3:14:07 GMT -6
The vast majority of engagements in a war are cruiser engagements in one form or another. Question: Why would I add, say, 6 to 8 CL to my fleet and run the risk of losing at least some of them every war when I can build two additional CA and be almost guaranteed victory in that majority of engagements? Because, barring misfortune, I'm already confident of winning the overwhelming majority of cruiser engagements using CLs. Why should I build a big expensive ship that's more of a loss if something goes wrong when I already have significant confidence in my ability to win cruiser engagements with a much cheaper ship, especially considering that that cheaper ship is a much, much better ship to use for screening capital ships than a larger cruiser that costs almost as much as the ships it's supposed to be protecting? [/div][/quote] In the very early game, I find CLs are at a sour spot in the power/speed curve, and just end up being too expensive for their combat value. Later on as engine tech improves, they become more viable, but the late date at which it becomes possible to give them a decent centerline armament still makes a heavy CL / light CA with an 8" or 9" main battery and a secondary battery of 4"/5"/6" (according to best available gun quality) a better bargain than a classic protected cruiser CL with an all-light armament. Once dreadnought CLs (finally!) become possible, the size of capital ships is often into the 40kton range, and a heavy cruiser style CA tends not to be much more expensive compared to a BC or fast BB than a CL is to a B or CA or a pre/semi-dreadnought BC in the early game. Plus, the AI is often building at least a few such ships (and Germany is building Panzerschiffe), for which a CA is a cheaper answer than a BC. I do find that I build Atlanta-style CLs for the AA / light forces gunboat role (with destroyers in the torpedo boat role), and for filling foreign service, but CAs are definitely part of my fleet mix. When the last of my BCs age out (the same build scheme I use for BCs early on eventually qualifies as a fast BB as it gets heavier), I'll even start building new BCs on heavy-cruiser lines (18-20 kton, relatively light armor, speed above any capital ship in service, 11-12 in guns) as a firm answer to German Panzerschiffe. Of course, all this might be much different if I were typically playing Britain.
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Post by colprice on Apr 3, 2021 7:29:38 GMT -6
If you could define a squadron of torpedo boats and a CL as a leader (early 1900s - ca 1918) then you have the cl able to use gunfire on a target while the Torpedo boats close to effective range. That's when the CLs would be good - the other use I've found is for a 4" cl - but high speed - to act as a raider.
Colin
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Post by akosjaccik on Apr 3, 2021 8:48:26 GMT -6
Thank you gents for voicing your opinion! I thought it wouldn't be a clear-cut case, but I wasn't ready for just how close the votes will be. Based on the results, it looks as if janxol's comment encapsulated the general compromise ("Laying down an experimental class of maximum two ships to serve as testbed of this concept would be reasonable"), so that's what I will attempt to do, and incorporate the program into the fiscal year of 1912. 20cm L/45 1912M turret for the "Ersatz Donau" program
Now that I'm not exactly posing an "update", I may as well touch upon the real historical parallels of the "proto- heavy cruiser" in the Kriegsmarine. The last k.u.k. cruisers to enter service were the 3500t Novara-class ships often called as "Rapidkreuzer" - fast cruisers, with a top speed of 27 knots and nine 10cm guns.
The S.M.S. Saida of the Novara-class, source on the image Their spiritual successors would've been the Ersatz Zenta fast cruisers: 5000-ton vessels with 14 x 12cm/45 Skoda K14 guns capable of 30 knots originally; however the experiences of the Great War - notably the loss of the Emden - seemed to push the plans towards gun caliber instead of quantity, not dissimilarly to the proposed capital ship plans. Thus in 1916 the drafts were revised, the main armament got changed to 2x1 19cm Skoda K03 guns, with a secondary suite of 6-8x 15cm/50 Skoda K10. The issue was the significant additional weight, and while some calculations thought that the hull could take this maaybe alright, the designers considered this modification to be too severe for the original plans. Still, the idea of the "big gun light cruiser" appeared on the table. Probably this influenced Franz Pitzinger to offer a cruiser-proposal - the last cruiser-proposal of k.u.k. Navy - (referred to as Project VII) for the MTK in 1917, which was approved in August, 1918. The plan calculated with ~10000 tons (standard displ.), 32-33 knots @ 90000 SHP and 3x2 19cm/45 guns. Interestingly the "secondary armament" consisted of 4x1 9cm/45 Skoda K14 dedicated anti-aircraft guns, so the cruiser relied fully on her three turrets for surface-to-surface combat, not counting the two underwater torpedo tubes. Of course, the ship never had the opportunity to leave the drawing board. However, a lesser known fact is that Austria-Hungary (or, to be more precise, it's industrial sector) actually began building a heavily armed cruiser, although originally for China. China ordered four cruisers right before the outbreak of the war, the drawings of the larger type (a single vessel) you can see above - my "Ersatz Donau" ships' turrets are roughly based on these drawings. It's twin turrets housed 20cm/45 Skoda armament with 12x12cm secondaries on pedestal mounts. The belt armor consisted of 100mm plates, the deck had a thickness of 63mm, with a "flat deck on belt" scheme. She was supposed to reach a top speed of 28 knots with her 37000 SHP Ganz-Danubius steam turbines. Luck wasn't on the ship's side however. Although her keel got laid down in 1915 by the CNT, the war immediately scooped up the experienced workforce, and construction slowed down. Later this year, Italy temporarily captured the city and the shipyard, but (although the hull was nearly finished), the italians apparently didn't do anything in particular with it. After recapturing the area in 1916 it appeared that while the shipyard was looted dry, the hull itself was in a good condition and construction could've been continued., the machinery and some parts of the armament were ready for delivery similarly to a portion of steel parts manufactured in Austria. The Navy thought about this option as the cruiser could've been useful, but Skoda needed more time (34 months) for the 20cm turrets to be done, thus the first idea was to redesign the ship with solely and uniformly 15cm armament. In the end, this did not come to fruition either, Italy recaptured the area in 1917, and after the war ended, Skoda was not able to sell the ship the by now not interested chinese. What remained of her got scrapped in 1922.
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Post by captaintrek on Apr 5, 2021 10:25:23 GMT -6
Hey, what fleet size is this campaign played on?
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Post by akosjaccik on Apr 5, 2021 11:17:08 GMT -6
Hey, what fleet size is this campaign played on? If I recall correctly, medium, however the campaign was started on 1.03 (or 1.02, somewhere in that ballpark) and a subsequent patch modified the fleet size values, so the current 'medium' isn't quite identical to this save.
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Post by pastur on Apr 5, 2021 15:13:10 GMT -6
Will the website ever be restored? Also, a lot of the images earlier in the thread appear to be missing or broken.
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Post by captaintrek on Apr 6, 2021 7:40:26 GMT -6
Hey, what fleet size is this campaign played on? If I recall correctly, medium, however the campaign was started on 1.03 (or 1.02, somewhere in that ballpark) and a subsequent patch modified the fleet size values, so the current 'medium' isn't quite identical to this save. Probably the rough equivalent of what is currently Large considering how many Bs you started with, if I had to guess.
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Post by akosjaccik on May 22, 2021 9:27:08 GMT -6
pastur : Strictly speaking I am still working on- and with the website and then "convert" it to a forum post, but I can't upload and actualize it since I ran out of free storage space. The reason why the old posts don't feature any images are... completely beyond me, the forum board was just fine with direct links to images on the original webpage for months, and then one day it just ceased the function - I am using Imgur ever since, but I could't even begin uploading and meticulously replacing more than a hundred of older images in the earlier posts. Additionally, the website wasn't/isn't mobile-friendly. As such, in a "You know what? I give up."-moment I admitted defeat and in order to not link folks a website that can't actually get past ~1908-09-ish I just deleted the link itself from my signature. I don't quite know yet, how will I resolve this situation, pehaps I'll convert the earlier years into PDF and upload it or something, if I get around it and figure out how exactly should I proceed with that. In hindsight, if I'd have seen the amount of issues emerging, I would've just went with simply the forum posts to begin with probably and ditched the idea of sub-pages for different sections. But for now, this is the situation I am currently in, the earlier years (at least the images) are not working on the NWS boards for whatever reason, and the newer years won't work on the website.
captaintrek : I checked the Autosave.bcs file, it shows "FleetSize = 3" value. Wether this is a comparable value across the different patches or does it even change, I honestly don't know, but that's the exact number I can give.
...also, a bite-sized update.
January, 1911
Taking care of the exthausted Coastal Defense Divisions is nearing to it's final phases. Twenty MT.600-class Minentenders returned to service, all of them in a much better shape than what simply a few buckets of grease and a new coat of paint would've put them into. Four of the vessels received a major modification even, followed by their reclassification as MT.600B. The idea is not only to keep them in service for longer for their originally intended purposes, but also to have the ability to utilize the hulls for testing, training, practicing existing- and seeking new methods of warfare to a limited extent.
MT.600-class Agathe (leading) and Emma out on an exercise. The gun shield was a requested upgrade, in one case the crew of Stambul tested a similar field modification during the war made with the boiler-grade steel plates available at hand - although no casualties occured due to the lack of it. Razing the poop deck was a less popular idea, but the added rails seem to drastically enhance the minelaying procedure. At the time being the vessels otherwise retained the original Skoda 10cm/40 M1896 armament.
Speaking of new methods of warfare, after working together with (and often loaning) the Army's observation balloon units for quite some time, the Marinesektion of the War Ministry approved the estabilishment of the Navy's own air units and its higher organization, the K.u.K. Seeflieger Korps. The catch is? ...without a separate funding, so the Navy is paying the bills - in other words, the Navy is authorized to spend on flying contraptions as they see fit, but spend as much as they are willing to divert from the surface units. On paper, this ensures that the Marinekommandant has direct and stable authority over it's aerial assets without any other branch tampering with them or just simply causing communication or in general chain-of-command issues, on the other hand this may result in some infighting for the available and relatively scarce funding. Admittedly, all of this is mostly theoretical at the time, given that the freshly minted Naval Air Arm currently has three Drachenballoons at their disposal and that's it. Still, it's as good of a start as any. Exciting new ways to die at sea, what's not to look forward to?
February, 1911
When it comes to the Russian Empire, perhaps the best word to describe our diplomatic relations would be "orderly". Although the panslavic idea creates some unnecessary tension in the southern regions, there aren't any outright claims or grievances floating around at the time that would make proper dialogue impossible. This goes doubly so for the respective navies with no real common operational grounds, plus the Rossiyskiy Imperatorskiy Flot appears to have bigger fishes to fry in mind. As such, it was a surprise being able to host one of their vessels at the end of the month arriving for a goodwill-visit.
The Latnik, while her service years are slowly adding up to a decade, is an imposing sight still, likely representing the global zenith of the classic armored cruiser line. While it is somewhat unclear how such a massive and relatively expensive asset fits into the russian doctrine given their already well-renowned Bayan-class for example (word is that she came into existence due to the lobbying of rear admiral Dmitri Vedernikov rather than hard necessity), it is hard to deny that Latnik had little issue finding suitable tasks during the Anglo-Russian War. Besides, she may have served as a proof-of-concept for very early forays into the all big gun- and battlecruiser-ideas.
For this reason it was probaby especially interesting for the ship's select Russian officers to be able to visit the currently-built Lissa-class battlecruisers with their own eyes in Trieste - something their intelligence already reported about in lenghts no doubt anyways. Some of the civilian members of the diplomatic mission, agents of the Tula Arsenal and the Obukhov State Plant, made some well-placed, polite remarks about the barbettes still requiring the armament to be installed - armament which they could help with in the future perhaps. In a similarly polite manner they were informed that they are, as they say, knocking on open doors. Skoda is manufacturing highly regarded equipment, but not exactly cheap equipment, and making it clear that they have an international competition to calculate with may be paramount in curtailing the costs coming from their dominance over the domestic market.
The Russian mission finally departed with some (mostly informal) reassuring that the austrian investments are interested in moving money around in the wake of the recent turmoil on the Balkans, but are not interested in moving troops around. ...and with a few bottles of Imperial Tokay wine, although for some reason the box contained more bottles than the delivery note indicated. Perhaps as a preventive measure in case some of those inexplicably get lost during the long way home.
March, 1911
The spring arrived with a fair amount of work, but fortunately not with a whole lot of pressing matters. Cooperation with Germany made it possible to dwelve somewhat into the survivability, subdivision and damage control systems of the ships, whereas the industrial sector - likely incentivized by the two large battlecruisers - continued to expand it's facilities.
April,1911
The Littorio ("Lictor") is somewhat larger than it's predecessor, the Vittorio Veneto and supposedly - although not significantly - less armored in order to gain a broadside of eight 13" rifles in contrast to V.V.'s six. For now it seems that the italians calculate with 13" rifles mounted on platforms capable of doing 20-21 knots. This can be considered good news for the Lissa-class, they are yet to truly come into existence however, and the Kaiser-class semi-dreadnoughts may face issues, especially once the second ship of the Littorio-class will join up with her sister. If there is a good time to wage war against the state dressed up in red rags, this doesn't feel like being so.
R&D also diverted some resources towards external projects in this month, we'll see what comes of it. Decades ago Whitehead's first torpedo experiments resulted in the gendarmerie being called upon them; if nothing else, we should at least not obstruct independent development that may or may not prove to be useful and is willing to cooperate with the Kriegsmarine. Besides, if it turns out to be useful and we are not buying it, someone else will.
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Post by thefleetofoceans on May 23, 2021 2:24:21 GMT -6
and it's back. It's good to see the tradition of tie ins with other RP's are still very much in evidence.
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Post by janxol on May 25, 2021 2:36:38 GMT -6
Well that's a crossover I didn't expect but is fun to see. I'm impressed you took the time to draw the Latnik and even more impressed on the similarity to the side-view that I have cobbled together. And it's good to see the AAR continue.
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Post by garrisonchisholm on Jun 7, 2021 9:12:43 GMT -6
My formal apologies for being absent so long, and depriving the world of more Klink-isms. It is good to be able to catch up on the always masterful presentation.
So the last "state of the fleet" presentation I can see is the post-war summary from June '07. Is that still largely accurate?
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