Post your best ship designs here

[galagagalaxian]

Congratulations, you've made something that the Austrian/Spanish Mini-Bs can look at and say "at least I'm not that".


Alternatively, you built armoured cruisers and swore up and down to the President they were battleships. 

[wolfpack]

at  least it has decent armor for a pre dread

[director]

It is the teacup puppy of battleships! Adorable... but not long-lived if the big dogs get at it...

I admire and applaud your initiative. Let us know how they work out.

[Airy W]

Dec 1, 2016 18:11:05 GMT -6 galagagalaxian said:

Alternatively, you built armoured cruisers and swore up and down to the President they were battleships. 

I was honestly a little bit surprised the game let me get away with it.

Dec 1, 2016 19:25:34 GMT -6 wolfpack said:

at  least it has decent armor for a pre dread

It's remarkable what you can do when a ship is 48% armor.

Dec 1, 2016 22:49:50 GMT -6 director said:

It is the teacup puppy of battleships! Adorable... but not long-lived if the big dogs get at it...

I admire and applaud your initiative. Let us know how they work out.

They worked out so well that Presidente requested another two!

After that they had a long and distinguished career of veeeery slowly patrolling the coast of Chile for raiders. In 17 years not one enemy was brave enough to attempt battle with them!

[director]

That's priceless. On second thought, that's very good value for the money!

[theexecuter]

Now there is an idea for an AAR...no ships bigger than 8k tons, with all classes represented...

[Airy W]

I think I can succeed for about 10 years. For that long my superior numbers of CA will allow me to win blockades and I will be able to escape dangerous engagements intact. After that point the enemy will start producing battlecruisers that I wont be able to fight nor run away from.

[beastro]

Oct 5, 2016 7:04:12 GMT -6 Noname117 said:

So I'm not sure if this is going to prove to be a good design or not, but it is most certainly an interesting design.




I'll probably test it in a war against France later today during a livestream

My end design CAs are used to protect my BBs from destroyer attacks and then to support my DDs and CLs in torpedo charges, carrying their own. They come with 24 6, 5 and 3 inch guns all in quads to rip apart anything that tries to get close while carrying enough armour to make sure they're able to survive to get out of Dodge while the DDs suicide and the CLs roll the dice to see if they can survive or not. They only go where the battlefleet does and don't have a chance to run into any battles without at least some BCs pulling much of the weight in cruiser battles and such.

This game really leans towards WWII experience that the 8 inch cruiser guns weren't the best choice and that the 6 inch, 12-15 gun CLs are the better choice for counter anything less than a CA.

Amusingly, before I settled on this I made a 24 gun 5 inch cruiser class on 15,000 tons and had a couple of them run into a battlecruiser on a convoy mission. I was reminded of the River Plate, split my guys up to allow one a chance of getting close enough to fire on the BC and would up ripping it to pieces before putting a few torps into it with one of them while the other puttered away badly beaten up.

[ramjb]

Latecomer to the "CA was useless IRL and only built because Washington treaty" party. But I'll just point out a couple facts.

-The 8 inch cruiser was a natural step up from something that was already around, and built. The Hawkins class cruisers. So the assessment that says the "heavy cruiser" would've never happened on it's own is wrong, as they were already happening in WWI. The Hawkins class was ordered in 1915, pre-jutland, and precisely in the middle the battlecruiser high tide, and it's proof that the class would've naturally evolved with no binding naval treaties around.

-The Washington Naval Treaty created the figure of "heavy cruiser" precisely to deal with those kind of ships, as they were perceived as a big threat by the americans and japanese, who had none and saw them as a serious concern as those ships could easily brush aside any screening CL force. The first movement was to ban them alltogether, but the british remained adamant that they didn't want to give those ships up as they obviously were very important for their trade protection needs. So instead of banning the type, a new class denomination was created, officializing the spilt between the "usual" 6'' light cruisers and the new breed with larger, more powerful guns, and so the japanese and americans were allowed to build their own versions to counter the Hawkins on their own.

And then they proceeded to curtail the design growth potential of such a class by limiting it's tonnage to pretty much what the Hawkins displaced.


-It's worth reminding that for small local fleets isn't obvious but for large navies with worldwide commitments, cruisers were the main tool for power projection. Particularily the british, they coudln't afford to have so many BCs as to cover all the foreign station needs, so they needed something smaller, yet powerful enough to act as a flagship and fight off enemy raiders/cruisers. Had the Washington Naval Treaty never happened, those cruisers would STILL have happened.


-What the WNT did was two things:

A) Strangle the top tonnage to 10.000 tons effectively forcing a series of horribly unbalanced, ill protected warships (it was not until the late 30s that the technology was evolved enough to allow for a good balance of speed, and protection to be encapsulated in a 10k displacement ship armed with multiple 8'' turrets), and to constrain them to weapons of 8'' caliber or less.

B) Artificially inflate the number of such ships by forbidding the construction of new capital ships for 15 years. Being stripped of their ability to provide for new BCs and BBs, navies turned to the Heavy Cruiser as the ship to build. The effect is probably making the class much more numerous that what it'd been the case otherwise (with the possible exception of the Royal Navy who had a real and important use for those ships)


Had the WNT never happened the HEavy cruiser would've existed. It already existed before the treaty (again, the Hawkins class was just that, a heavy cruiser), and certainly navies of the world would react to the british investment in large cruisers armed with much heavier weapons than what the light cruiser ever had, by building their own heavy cruisers.

What the WNT did was to force the build of many more CAs than otherwise would probably have existed (as navies would still be focusing on capital ships mainly) and, more importantly restricting them in size so they wouldn't scale up with time the way dreadnoughts did, in weapon calibers and sizes. By restricting the class to numbers very close to those of the Hawkins itself (10k tons displacement, 8'' guns, the Hawkins displaced 9500 and had 7.5'' guns), they effectively capped the evolution of the class and restricted it to a tonnage so small it was almost impossible to make it a balanced combat unit.

And that's why it was later found that for ships displacing 10k tons the 6'' gun was better - because it allowed for a much better balance of firepower, speed and protection. Had the CA cruiser tonnage not been capped, it'd have grown up in size a lot, and it'd ended in ships that no light cruiser would've been able to face in a serious encounter (just in pretty much the way a Cleveland would've had a really horrible time going against a Baltimore, for instance).


So the WNT didn't "create" the heavy cruiser. That class already existed. What the WNT did was to pretty much put it on chains and limit it to such a tight displacement budget, that the resulting ships built under those treaty limits were, with few exceptions, suboptimal.
 Had no Washington Naval Treaty happened, the Heavy Cruiser would've existed. And would've been much larger than what it was historically, and carried larger weapons than 8''', producing much more balanced (and much better) ships as a result.

[danon]

A couple of designs from my latest United Kingdom game, in which varied tech somewhat screwed me, by almost exclusively giving me DD and CL related advances, while my heavier vessels frequently lagged behind the rest of the world. Consequently, my fleet transitioned more and more to relying on these fast, lightly armoured ships, often with powerful torpedo armaments to decide fleet engagements, and while losses were consistently heavy especially among my Destroyers, some of them racked up considerable kill counts thanks to daring torpedo runs. On the bright side, this bizarrely one-sided advancement meant I stumbled into superfiring and multi-gun turret setups the earliest I've ever gotten them. Figured I'd share them as this is the most I've made use of these very light style ships in a game yet and we seem to focus more on BBs, BCs and CAs in here. They're also some of the most prematurely modern designs I've had to boot. 

Knight-class Destroyer

1912 Rebuild 

First up we have the 1910 designed Knight-class Destroyer and it's 1912 Rebuild which added a second set of torpedoes to the centreline. I built these immediately after receiving 1500t DDs, DD Superimposed Mounts and Double Turrets in quick succession and were intended to thoroughly outperform and outgun any potential enemy Destroyer or even Light Cruiser they might encounter, allowing other vessels to focus on the enemy capital ships. In practice despite their poor torpedo armament and fragility they ended up being some of my most successful capital ship killers in the wars against France and Russia. Particularly HMS Lancelot, lead ship of the class and seen above post her 1912 refit, is credited with a major role in the sinking of 4 BBs in her 11 year career despite only seeing battle on only 3 occasions, only two of which were Fleet engagements. She was eventually sunk by a dastardly French Submarine in 1921 after having been transferred to a Coastal Patrol role. The Knights were so capable in fact that they would remain the premier destroyers of the Royal Navy until 1919, with the introduction of the Tribal-class. 

Tribal-class Destroyer

Honestly the Tribals weren't much of an improvement on the earlier Knights, they were simply an incremental upgrade, moving the Torpedoes together into a single quad mount and improving the fire control with a Central Rangefinder, along with mines additional shells for the 5 inch guns which had a tendency to run out in protracted engagements with the Knights. They did solid work as Fleet Destroyers and in a particularly sterling engagement, HMS Cossack engaged a trio of US Destroyers and a Light Cruiser alone after the accompanying HMS Galahad was sunk in the opening salvoes when her torpedoes exploded on the rack. While the Cossack would limp away bloodied, 2 of the 3 US DDs and the CL were sunk, while the last surviving vessel was just as badly damaged as Cossack herself. 

Paladin-class Destroyer

My final Destroyer design was the 1922 Paladin-class, a slower vessel designed for long range raiding missions alongside the Royal-class Light Cruiser (see below). Again, not a lot to be said for the Paladin, basically just a Tribal refitted for long range roaming. All of these ships were named for Knight-class vessels, which had now finally been phased out of the fleet entirely to be replaced by Tribals. 

Royal-class Light Cruiser

The comparatively light nature of the Royal Navy by the late stages of the game (at least on a ship by ship basis, if not on total tonnage), meant that a lot of my wars were fought with extensive raiding campaigns, utilising both Submarines and CLs in distant waters to cut off enemy shipping and starve them out. The Royal-class was designed as a ship purpose built for this purpose, with exceptional range and speed and a large number of fast firing 5 inch guns that would prove devastating against opposing CLs and DDs often found escorting Convoys, along with 12 torpedoes for use against heavier targets. However the small bore guns would prove woefully ineffective at targeting hostile CAs and they were very poorly armoured, making them vulnerable in the extreme to CAs that could catch them. Two Royals (HMS Arthur and HMS Guinevere) were made and both would survive their service in the US-British war of the 1923-25, though HMS Arthur was nearly sunk in its first engagement when it slaughtered an entire convoy of US merchant ships and their DD escorts almost single-handedly but was beaten bloody by a supporting CA and it's attendant flotilla after loitering too long in the area. 

[rimbecano]

Dec 8, 2016 8:23:04 GMT -6 beastro said:

Oct 5, 2016 7:04:12 GMT -6 Noname117 said:

So I'm not sure if this is going to prove to be a good design or not, but it is most certainly an interesting design.




I'll probably test it in a war against France later today during a livestream

This game really leans towards WWII experience that the 8 inch cruiser guns weren't the best choice and that the 6 inch, 12-15 gun CLs are the better choice for counter anything less than a CA.

I've found in the midgame that CLs with 2x8in and secondaries of 8-10x5in tends to chew enemy CLs to pieces. the 5-inchers provide volume of fire,  and the 8-inchers, when they hit, punch bigger holes (in either case the armor on enemy CLs is light enough to be penetrated).

I forget what my endgame CLs tend to look like,  but I tend to build mostly battlecruisers and CLs. Late game CAs tend to be built as counters to a specific enemy class,  and usually look something like the RL WWII Brooklyns or Alaskas, depending  on what they're meant to counter (in the latter case they tend to be BCs in-game, but, unlike my normal BCs, not armored to stand in the line of battle). The threat they're designed to counter pretty much always has 8"+ guns,  so they do as well. 

[luna]

I designed these two ships about 2 years apart. The second ship has 80% similarity with the first one, so I got an 80% discount on the design. Only cost somewhere in the range of 800k to design. I think the first one was somewhere around 4M to design, but I ain't got memory of it. But assuming it was, the first ship cost a total of 64.5M to build and the second one 61.2M, which means the second is not only better in every way but also cheaper. The second ship was a response to the 50M for new capital ship event, I had only planned on building 1. It really hurts having no naval budget and brutal technical backwardness. 
I wouldn't say they are my best designs, but I think they are interesting ships... of technically the same class.
The year of completion is 1908 and 1910 respectively. I think they'll last quite a while as cruiser hunters.

[boomboomf22]

So this class of Semi-Dread was reasonably effective.  It is the result of a 20% research game, and was commissioned right after a 2 year arms limitation treaty, meaning the other ships in service at the time were 15,000 tons.  I foolishly overwrote to save, so this is from memory, but here: 
Charles Martel
Armament: 2*2 12" guns, 14*1 11" guns, 14*casemate 4" guns
Armor: Belt 14", Deck 2", CT 15", Turret 14.5", Battery 9"
20kts
30,000 tons

Incidentally significant editing went into the image to get the turrets and stuff to work and match the now lost top view.

[Airy W]

That design would also be pretty decent in the lategame if you have secondary director. Those 11 inch guns will suddenly be very accurate and ammo gets very good.

[Roumba]

Does the game give centerline torpedo mounts have a restricted arc of fire as compared to wing/side mounts? If it does, should try using side mounts to give my DDs a better chance of getting a firing solution or is that rarely what keeps the AI from launching torpedoes?