French Wing Turrets

[polygon]

In order to build properly French ships, one requires the ability to put single wing turrets of any caliber anywhere they like. Pictured in attachment is an example of a Properly French ship that is not currently legal for France in 1900 - the heyday of such designs!

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[seawolf]

Jun 16, 2020 20:08:03 GMT -6 polygon said:

In order to build properly French ships, one requires the ability to put single wing turrets of any caliber anywhere they like. Pictured in attachment is an example of a Properly French ship that is not currently legal for France in 1900 - the heyday of such designs!

I think it does work, but has to be 4 single guns

[aeson]

Jun 16, 2020 20:26:22 GMT -6 seawolf said:

I think it does work, but has to be 4 single guns

Or use a 7" or lighter main battery.

[wlbjork]

As you technically need two different calibre primary guns, you aren't replicating the Charles Martel-Massena series

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_battleship_Bouvet. Only 5 ships built to that layout, and it probably wasn't successful as it was not repeated.

[janxol]

I built those, they were perfectly legal. In the predread era you can have a max of 4 main guns.

[rs2excelsior]

Didn’t the Charles Martel and similar French pre-dreads carry mixed main batteries though? 12” single guns on the fore/aft turrets, 10” on the wings, if I remember correctly. Which is something I don’t think you can do in RTW without the heavy secondary battery tech.

[aeson]

Jun 19, 2020 0:42:59 GMT -6 janxol said:

I built those, they were perfectly legal. In the predread era you can have a max of 4 main guns.

I would debate the idea that that's 'perfectly' legal, because it's fairly obviously not intended to be possible:

Wing turrets are not normally available for main guns over 10" without the Main Battery Wing Turrets technology, so if you want to do something like this you have to pick your turrets with the main caliber set to 10" or less and then increase the caliber to what you actually wanted.

In the predread era you can have a max of 4 main guns.

It's a bit more complicated than that - the design check will declare the design illegal if you have more than two 8" or heavier main battery wing turrets or attempt to pair two 8" or heavier single wing turrets with anything other than centerline single turrets regardless of the total number of guns on the ship, throwing an error that states that the building nation does not have the technology to use single wing turrets for guns heavier than 7".

Also, you can have up to 20 guns in the main battery of a predreadnought-era battleship or first class cruiser if for some reason you're using 6" or 7" main guns:

[janxol]

It didnt throw any errors at me. To get the wing turrets I initially set it to CA, add the turrets, then switch it to B. The design check is fine with that and has no complaints. There were no external edits to this design.

[aeson]

Jul 2, 2020 2:25:18 GMT -6 janxol said:

It didnt throw any errors at me. To get the wing turrets I initially set it to CA, add the turrets, then switch it to B. The design check is fine with that and has no complaints. There were no external edits to this design.

Whether the design is initially classified as a CA or a B is irrelevant; wing turrets for guns 11" and heavier are not available in the 1900 start:

The only way that I can see to do this is to set the gun caliber to 10" or less, pick your turrets, and then increase the caliber to 11" or more. As this is a rather roundabout way to get heavy wing turrets onto the ship, it would seem to be unintended functionality even though the game does not throw errors during the design check phase. Had it been intended to work like this, you would expect that the design could be created in a more straightforward manner: by directly choosing wing turrets from the Turrets menu with the intended gun caliber and hull classification already set.